Summary

Every year, millions of people around the world are either threatened by evictions or are actually unlawfully evicted. Forced evictions result in severe trauma and in serious declines in the standard of living of those that are already marginalized or vulnerable within their respective societies, often leaving them homeless, landless, and living in extreme poverty and destitution. Even if the phenomenon of forced evictions constitutes a distinct phenomenon under international law, the consequences arising therefrom are similar to those arising from arbitrary and/or involuntary displacement of people from their homes, lands and communities.

This Handbook on Assessing the Impact of Eviction has been jointly commissioned by UN-Habitat and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) under the auspices of the UN Housing Rights Programme (UNHRP), in collaboration with leading housing rights partners.

The purpose of the Handbook is to raise awareness of the importance of assessing the impact of eviction for individuals as well as communities, and it provides a framework for doing so during any stage of the eviction/resettlement process. While seeking to consolidate and build upon current eviction impact assessments practices as well as disseminating existing initiatives and tools at the global level, this Handbook thus intends to increasingly ensure that development projects sufficiently factor in the costs to individuals/communities before, during and after the eviction/resettlement process.

The readers of this Handbook will most often be professionals (academics, policy makers, practitioners) whose work is related to assessing the impact of eviction either in the field or through research. It is also hoped that the Handbook will benefit individuals and communities affected by eviction through creating a greater understanding of both the tangible and intangible costs associated with eviction/resettlement on the part of national/local governments and other actors in development processes.