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The Leitner Center for International Law and Justice has released two new reports on land and housing rights in Nepal and Tanzania published by the Crowley Program in International Human Rights. Both reports are now available for download on the Leitner Center website and are based on extensive and wide-ranging interviews with government officials, the judiciary, academics, lawyers, non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations, activists, and organizers.
In 2010, the Crowley Program traveled to Tanzania where it examined the urban housing crisis there. The final report, A Home in the City: Women’s Struggle to Secure Adequate Housing in Urban Tanzania, (PDF) represents the culmination of a year-long project undertaken by faculty and students at the Leitner Center at Fordham Law School to study women’s access to adequate housing in urban Tanzania and their experiences of informal settlements in light of Tanzania’s international commitments. In the report, 2009–2010 Crowley Fellow Katherine Hughes examines the difficulties that Tanzanian women continue to have in accessing access to housing in the face of discriminatory inheritance laws, an entrenched patriarchal culture, and pervasive domestic violence, among multiple other discriminatory practices. To learn more about the Tanzania project, visit its program page.
The new report on Nepal, “Land is Life, Land is Power”: Landlessness, Exclusion, and Deprivation in Nepal, (PDF) 
also examines the struggle ordinary people have in obtaining socio-economic rights despite existing international commitments. This report, based on two years of research and fieldwork in Nepal in 2009 and 2010, takes as its focus the impact that inadequate access to land has on human rights, including the rights to housing, food, water, and political participation.
The Crowley Program in International Human Rights is a vital component of the Leitner Center, and has been examining pressing international human rights issues for over a decade. The 2011 program recently returned from examining access to mental health programs in Cambodia. A report is expected in Fall 2011.
To request printed copies of either report, please contact leitnercenter@law.fordham.edu.
