Nearly forty years ago, the UN General Assembly designated the first Monday in October as World Habitat Day, an annual reflection to renew our consciousness about the built environment we live in. At this moment, we are witnessing the same UN member states failing in their obligations and commitments to build a better world.

It was at the First UN Conference on Housing and Human Settlements (Habitat I) almost 50 years ago that its outcome document acknowledged how “The ideologies of States are reflected in their human settlement policies. These being powerful instruments for change, they must not be used to dispossess people from their homes and their land, or to entrench privilege and exploitation” (H1, ¶3). States’ also committed there to conform their human settlement policies with human rights and other binding obligations.

As we reflect on that principle, we are intensely mindful that this day also marks a full year of Israel’s latest round of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Just as that serial crime culminates long and incremental dispossession and destruction of the Palestinian people’s habitat, Israel—an alien settler-colonial race-based state—has variously targeted the habitat of Palestine’s Indigenous People in a strategy to eliminate and replace them.

North American and European governments have led this failure of the ‘international community’ to uphold standards of civilized behavior, breaking the most sacrosanct norms of international law. Israel’s long US, British and German-backed military doctrine targets Palestinian homes, shelters and shelter seekers in an unbroken pattern that has led us to witness gruesome scenes of this year-long genocide in Gaza in real-time.

This World Habitat Day commemoration also causes us to reflect on the criminal practice of governments and nonstate actors usurping or otherwise denying land belonging to targeted peoples and communities to build and work on. This reflection in view of such persistent and anachronistic Western colonial pursuits in Palestine reveals layers of broken promises to build a world better than the primitive warring centuries precedent.

However, in too many cases, human settlement policies apply powerful instruments to perpetrate population transfer, apartheid and genocide domestically and extraterritorially. All these grave crimes coincide under conflict, occupation, war and denial of entire peoples’ self-determination manifesting with impunity in such diverse contexts as Kashmir, Palestine, Tibet, Ukraine and Western Sahara under illicit occupations. Within the reach of integral states elsewhere, similar behaviors have especially attacked the habitats of Kurds; Uighurs; Yemenis; peoples of Sudan; the Rohingya and other groups in and from Myanmar; ethnic minorities, generally; Indigenous Peoples; and the abject poor and impoverished communities everywhere.

This World Habitat Day, no one can claim not to know.

In a world of unprecedented disparity, people still share a human need for increasingly finite land to live and work on. And that resource is shrinking and degrading with the galloping advance of agribusiness and climate change. Acknowledging and rectifying historical responsibility for this iniquity and its consequences seem as elusive as the needed annulment of the UN Security Council veto privileges that have sabotaged global peace, security and accountability for decades.

In such a year of failed efforts to uphold peremptory norms and reform the UN with a Pact for the Future, this World Habitat Day should come as an epiphany. Plenty are the foregoing habitat-related norms and state obligations to uphold peace and security, sustainable development and human rights. However, as of this writing, governments and their diplomats have succeeded majestically only to erode these values that were supposed to undergird our institutions. Consequently, the streets have swollen with protesters against the serial destruction of humans and their habitat. This has to be a day to urge implementing the norms.

After all the state obligations, commitments and agreements to build a more-livable world. This World Habitat Day reminds us that, by now, we should have become far better than this.

HIC-HLRN publications since last World Habitat Day

• Coveting Land, Targeting Homes, Shelters and Shelter Seekers: Israel’s raison d’état, military doctrine and consistent practice

• Security of Tenure: Evolving Norms through the UN Human Rights and Development Systems

• Counting Costs, Loss & Damage: Quantifying Impacts of Habitat-related Human Rights Violations amid Environmental Hazards and Climate-change

• Human Rights to Habitat Western Sahara: Land, Housing, Population Transfer, Natural Resources

• Whose Land? Whose Villages? Disappearing Villages of Istanbul

• The Land and Its People: Civil Society Voices Address the Crisis over Natural Resources in the Middle East/North Africa (updated 2024)

Don’t miss these references on World Habitat Day:

How Israel destroyed Gaza`s ability to feed itself (Al Jazeera)

Investigating war crimes in Gaza (Al Jazeera)

Drone footage shows a lively Gaza turned to wasteland since war began