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Policy responses to tenure insecurity145evictions and other crimes. Fortunately, such crimes are notcommitted against all of the world’s urban poor; but theyare, tragically, very widespread and constitute the mostsevere outcomes of practices that run counter to a worldgoverned by, and based on, the principles of human rights. Itis important to recall that it is through the existence of, andreliance on, such records that the housing and property restitutionrights of refugees can be secured. As the ethnicallydriven forced displacements in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo,Tajikistan and elsewhere have made clear, removing peopleforcibly from their homes, confiscating personal housing andproperty documents, destroying housing and property andcadastral records have all been used by ethnic cleansers intheir attempts to alter the ethnic composition of territoryand permanently prevent the return of those they forciblyexpelled from their homes. While little gain emerged fromthe Balkan wars of the past decade, the internationalcommunity was at least unambiguous about the need toreverse ethnic cleansing and to ensure the right to housingand property restitution for everyone displaced during theconflicts in the region. Intractable political considerationsaside, whenever such records are available followingconflict, the task of determining housing and property rightsis far easier and far more just.Where tenure rights were taken seriously, displacedpersons were able to reclaim their homes or find some senseof residential justice, indicating that restitution may not beas infeasible as it may at first appear. For instance, an importantrestitution programme in Kosovo, coordinated by theUnited Nations Housing and Property Directorate, hasprovided legal clarity regarding tenure and property rights to29,000 disputed residential properties in the disputedprovince since 2000. All but 6 per cent (1855 claims) hadbeen fully implemented by 2006. Some 68 per cent of allclaims were decided within three years. 31 Security CouncilResolution 1244, which established the United NationsInterim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), placeda high priority on property restitution for refugees and internallydisplaced persons (IDPs). The resolution of propertyissues was also considered vital to ensuring restoration ofthe rule of law and stimulating economic growth and stabilityin Kosovo and the wider region. Early initiatives in theproperty rights sector culminated in the establishment, in1999, of the Housing and Property Directorate and itsindependent quasi-judicial body, the Housing and PropertyClaims Commission, which aimed to achieve ‘an efficientand effective resolution of claims concerning residentialproperty’. 32 This comprised a relatively novel developmentin international post-conflict peace-building operations andrepresented a significant step forward for the restitution ofproperty rights of refugees and IDPs. It constituted a massclaims-processing mechanism, designed to resolve highnumbers of property claims through the application ofstandardized proceedings.The process was goal oriented in that its proceduresand evidentiary rules were designed to facilitate optimalefficiency in the resolution and implementation of decisionsin a cost-efficient manner in order to meet with the urgentdesire of refugees and IDPs to return to their homes, whileBox 6.11 Towards a new approach to land registrationA new and more appropriate land registration system should include the followingcomponents:• decentralized technical processes that are transparent and easily understood by localpeople;• land information management systems that can accommodate both cadastral parcels andnon-cadastral land information;• new ways of providing tenure security to the majority through documentation of rightsand boundaries for informal settlements and/or customary areas, without using cadastralsurveys, centralized planning and transfer of land rights by property lawyers;• accessible records, both in terms of their location and their user friendliness; and• new technical, administrative, legal and conceptual tools.Source: Fourie, 2001, p16at the same time preserving compliance with fair proceduresand due process guarantees.LEGAL PROTECTION FROMFORCED EVICTION… the issue of forced removals and forcedevictions has in recent years reached the internationalhuman rights agenda because it isconsidered a practice that does grave and disastrousharm to the basic civil, political,economic, social and cultural rights of largenumbers of people, both individual persons andcollectivities. 33Parallel to the policy discussions on provision of freeholdtitle versus other forms of tenure, various debates have beenunder way within the human rights community on relatedquestions, focusing primarily on the issue of forced evictionsand the human rights and security of tenure impacts thatthis can have upon the urban poor. This process has resultedin the practice of forced evictions moving from being viewedand acted upon almost solely as an act synonymous withapartheid-era South Africa (but largely neglected elsewhere),to a globally prohibited practice that has received considerableattention by human rights bodies. In fact, during thepast 20 years, forced evictions have been the subject of arange of international standard-setting initiatives, and anincreasing number of planned and past evictions carried outor envisaged by governments have been widely condemned.In the past few years, governments ranging from theDominican Republic, Panama, the Philippines and SouthKorea, to Turkey, Sudan and others have been singled out fortheir poor eviction records and criticized accordingly byUnited Nations and European human rights bodies. In 1990,in the first declaration that a state party had violated theInternational Covenant on Economic, Social and CulturalRights (ICESCR), the United Nations Committee onEconomic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) decided thatthe evictions that were attributable to the Government ofthe Dominican Republic were not merely failures to performThe resolution ofproperty issues was… considered vitalto ensuring restorationof the rule oflaw … and stabilityin Kosovo