Canadian human rights expert and anti-poverty advocate Leilani Farha will be the next United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. Leilani, Executive Director of Canada Without Poverty /Canada Sans Pauvrete, has worked in Canada and internationally on housing and human rights issues for 20 years. At the UN level, she helped to create the first human rights standards on women and the right to adequate housing. In Canada, she has worked with non-governmental groups across the country on a variety of initiatives including, most recently, an historic legal challenge to the federal government on the right to housing for those who are homeless.
Leilani is recognized as being smart, capable and effective in advancing a rights-based agenda and her candidacy was supported by a range of non-governmental groups in Canada and internationally. As a UN Special Rapporteur, Leilani will be an independent expert responsible for globally monitoring the status of the right to adequate housing, responding to alleged violations of this right, and representing the United Nations on visits to review housing conditions on official fact-finding missions to countries around the world. She has been appointed for a three-year mandate. She will continue in her national work in Canada tackling the root causes of poverty and inequality.
The appointment of Leilani is a special honour for Canada's civil society organizations. She joins two other Canadians recently appointed to UN human rights' positions: Chief Wilton Littlechild was appointed as a Member of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and Francois Crepeau was appointed as the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants. Canada has faced tough scrutiny and increasingly sharp criticism for its failure to meet its international housing rights obligations. An official fact-finding mission to Canada in 2007 by a previous Special Rapporteur, Miloon Kothari, led to a detailed indictment of the federal government and its failures to meet international housing rights standards.