 what's happening with human rights around our world on ThinkTech Live, broadcasting from our downtown studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, in Moana, New York, Aya. Today, we're looking at securing a standard of living and rights for all. Article 25, well-being around the world. Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides the power of ideas to initiate change in the world. And the UDHR outlines the opportunities for a new direction rooted in inherent dignity and inalienable rights for dynamic sustainable development and social democracy. Article 25 is the core of economic social and cultural rights in the UDHR. And Article 25 really calls on each country to realize the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one's family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or the lack of livelihood and circumstances to be on one's control. Today, we're joined by two human rights heroes sharing their examples of engagement to really make sure that Article 25 is reality and not just a promise on paper. Rob, thank you so much for joining us. Can you share with us a bit of why this issue is so important in international human rights law? I'm Josh, thanks for having me. I think it's kind of personal. I didn't learn about this document until I became a community organizer. And I entered community organizing from a lived experience, formerly homeless having spent two and a half years on the streets of Miami and 10 months in a New York City homeless shelter. And that process transformed me. And as I started to do some research understanding why people ended up homeless, why people were struggling for the right to housing, I came across this document and the document became sort of a religious instrument for me, sort of a way of saying, okay, if this country that I lived in helped create this document, then why don't they teach it in school? It always struck me as the sort of strange that it wasn't taught in our schools. And I had to learn it almost by act. That's a great point. Eric, can you share a bit why you think this issue is so important in international human rights law and what first inspired you to care about this issue? Sure. So, I mean, the core promise of the human rights system is that it enables people to live full lives with their full inherent human dignity. And here in the US we often think primarily as rights about the civil and political rights that were more familiar with the right to vote, the right to fair trial, those sorts of things. But what the human rights system says is you can't really fully enjoy those rights unless you have your basic needs met, your adequate housing, food, clothing, enough that you can sustain yourself in a healthy and dignified manner. And so that's what the promise of Article 25 is, is it says that those things that are your basic human needs are in fact your basic human right as well. And so, Martin Luther King, as fans were saying, what good is the right to sit at the lunch counter if you can't afford the burger? Or how can you fully enjoy your right to vote if you don't have a home and don't have a permanent address and aren't sure where you can go to vote or are afraid to leave your belongings behind for the time that you have to stand in line and go to the polls. So if you don't have those pieces of the right then you're not enjoying your full civil rights and you're not enjoying your full human rights. So all of the rights are interconnected and interdependent and I think that is the core principle of the universal human rights system. And the reason that I'm interested in all this is because my father grew up in the wake of World War II during World War II and in the wake of World War II in refugee camps across Europe came to the U.S. when he was about seven. But for me, I have always felt that I wouldn't want anything less for others than I would have wanted for my own father and here in the U.S. we see our friends and neighbors living in conditions that even my father living in refugee camp didn't have to go through. He knew that his basic needs for shelter over his head, some basic nutrition would be met and we aren't ensuring that even to our fellow neighbors. And so that's what kind of has always pushed me in this work is I wouldn't want anything less for anyone than I would have wanted to see done for my own father. Thank you so much, Eric. And Rob, you were describing that this document was crafted. It was Eleanor Roosevelt as chair of the Commission on Human Rights that this document should be known by everyone and maybe you could share a bit what actions you are involved with to actualize Article 25. And some are the champions that you know that really do put their lives on the line to make sure that this right is a reality. But I think Eric brought up a good point that I can relate to, right? If you don't have a dignified, affordable, clean place to call home, your life is in peril and you can't organize as I call myself and organize now for better conditions unless you have a secure home. And I think part of the issue here is we have, Eric mentioned civil rights and I sort of picked the two against one another, civil rights versus human rights. So I think our civil law is based on a constitution that was written 250 years ago and that's kind of problematic to me. It was written to support the ideology of a small group of people rather than a vast network. I always challenged that opening line to our constitution. We the people and now I start to ask, who were those people? Because if a person of color like myself was three fits of a man, I wasn't included in that. So I saw it problematic from the beginning but then going through this document, it gave me hope. It saw that outside of the US, it was practice, right? People are practicing in the international concept and international law in my opinion, supersede our civil law, right? If the rest of the world can abide by this document and live based on this document, why can't we? So I've seen people now and over the last 10, 15 years as I've been organized, I think when people spoke in particular housing, housing is a human right, it was somewhat of a slogan in the beginning but I think there's been a shift over the last 10 years that people are feeling it means something. And I think from where I sit in New York, that language is used heavily as people started fighting for the right to representation in housing court which is a civil court action in New York, right? And they would talk about housing as a human right and that goes right against our constitution or our state constitution and then whatever laws we have in place in New York city when you say, okay, so if this is the way you planted it, if housing isn't a human right but people are coming in here and saying it is, then that challenges judges to go on record as saying, it's not and I always believe that there's not a judge in this country that is gonna go on record saying housing isn't a, or at least be the first to go on record saying housing isn't a human right, right? So it's incumbent upon us to organize our communities to push up from the ground to say it and challenge those positions. So I've seen the right to council coalition do this good work. I've seen individual tenant organizing groups in New York and there are other groups around the country that are starting to pick up this work and understanding what human rights is and how we could use human rights instruments and use opportunities in Geneva to challenge our civil law in the US. Thanks so much, Robin. Eric, can you share a bit about what actions you're involved with to actualize the article and some of the champions you consider around this important article? Sure, so while the right itself is really intersectional talking about health, housing, food, et cetera, social security, disability, my focus is specifically on the right to housing and I don't wanna lose the fact that it is more comprehensive and there are lots of heroes working on lots of aspects of the right around universal right to health care and things like that. But specifically around the human right to housing as Rob said, this is something that was kind of viewed as more of a slogan, more aspirational and for many years, it's felt like bang my head against the brick wall trying to say, no, this is actual a right with legal content and we can use it as part of our organizing. We can use it in our court cases. But in the past few years, we really have seen that a lot of the base building work that folks like Rob and others have been doing is sinking in and as they say in New York City the rent is too damn high and people are coming and saying, well, I need to live somewhere. That should be a right for me. They understand it inherently. And so the work has really taken off in the last presidential election. We saw that seven of the Democratic candidates came out and said they believe that housing is a right and some said housing is a human right. President Biden is the first president quite possibly since FDR to come into office on a platform that housing should be a right for every American. And this language is getting picked up in Congress as well. The representative, Kamala Jayapal has introduced a bill since every year since 2020. The housing is a human right act. Other members of the squad, AOC, Cory Bush, Keilaan Omar, they're all talking on the floor of the house about housing as a human right. So the language is really resonating. And as I said, they're introducing legislation for it. Cory Bush was out on the steps of the Capitol building protesting during the middle of the pandemic to extend the eviction moratorium under a big banner that said housing is a human right. And so they are taking that promise, that rhetorical promise of the human right to housing and they're putting it into legislative bills and to executive actions. And that's really the kind of thing that we wanna see. This housing as a human right doesn't mean some foreign international law being imposed upon the US, but it's really that we are living up to our own value and putting into our own domestic law what this looks like. And so right now we're also working with folks out in California as part of the housing as a human right, thea.org efforts to pass ACA 10 an amendment to the California constitution that would actually recognize the human right to housing in California state constitutional law. And then it would be sort of the baseline for policy discussions there for mitigation. It doesn't dictate any specific thing, any specific practice on its own, but it says the policies that you put in place, the way we interpret our laws have to push forwards that end that housing is a human right. It's got the same weight as other constitutional right. And so this is really the way forward is to take these international standards and bring them into our domestic law, our domestic practice or domestic policy and make it real for people. Thank you and truly the two of you are definitely coming up with the boldest but also the most brilliant strategies of how to use the global and bring it on the grassroots. Rob, could you share with us a bit some of the first things you did? I remember around before the universal periodic review hosting a special opera tour visit, organizing different aspects bringing in other opera tours and could you share a bit of why those UN Human Rights Council special procedures are a valuable tool, how you've utilized them and how you've been able to actualize Article 25 through those exciting mechanisms to build our national human rights movement. Absolutely and thank you for bringing up some of that past work, which was very rewarding. I serve now as a special advisor for a human rights organization called Partners for Dignity and Rights, which was back in the day called NESRI, the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. And in October, 2009, we had an official mission to the US of a UN special rapid tour and the right to adequate housing. This position is considered, people who hold this position are considered an expert on housing issues across the globe. And we had Raquel Romick who was from Brazil come to the US. Eric was involved in that visit also, our two organizations collaborated together to put together that mission. NESRI at the time worked on the civil society portion and the law center worked on the elected and appointed officials side of organizing that visit. And I think it was very powerful because for the people in the different communities, the seven communities that were visited, you heard through town hall meetings, comments like, wow, this person came from Brazil to listen to us, to understand our housing conditions when our own representatives wouldn't listen, wouldn't do anything about it. And now this woman comes from Brazil and she's listening to us. I think that was very powerful for the people. We put together a documentary film. We had handed out back in the day, it was a thing called the flip camera which we distributed amongst the different groups to record the visit. And from all the footage, we created a documentary called More Than A Roof that I still use in my organizing because there was some powerful statements made from that visit, including when Raquel Romick visited Ocala-Lakata-Soon-Pindridge, South Dakota, where she said, housing is more than a roof, right? So a city like mine in New York, where we build an incredible number of shelters and think we've solved the problem, well, it's more than a roof, right? It's more than a roof over your head. It's a sense of community. It's all these other things. And as Eric was saying earlier, it's a sense of healthcare, food security. All these things are part of access to clean water, portable water, right? These are all part of these economic, culture and social rights. It was important having that repertoire visit. We stayed connected with UN Special Rapporteurs, including the current, who was Balakrishnan Rajagopal. And prior to Rajagopal was Lailani Farhar, who still seems to collaborate a lot with communities on the ground and understands the importance of having this, the movement come from the people directly impacted by these issues. I think there were opportunities there, but I also don't want to underestimate the opportunity to go to Geneva and argue on behalf of treaty bodies, those opportunities with some of these rights are entrenched in some of these treaty bodies. And things like ICERD, ICCPR, I shouldn't give the acronyms, I'll say the Committee on Ethnic Information Discrimination. And the Committee on Civil and Political Rights, I think also entrenched some of these standards and the right to housing is entrenched in both of them. So those are opportunities to bring communities to Geneva to argue this point before the Human Rights Council in Geneva and then put pressure on the United States to say, you need to open up, you need to change and you need to submit to these laws like the rest of the world is doing, right? There's no reason why you should take an exceptionalist attitude in the US just because you feel your constitution is this gold standard. It's not necessarily that. And here are the voices telling you that. No, a really good point you said. One of the other beautiful strategies, I think if Eric can share a bit, he's utilized the Universal Periodic Review, the three treaties that we have ratified of the 10 and made sure that they overlap to make sure that he could get that language and bring the global recommendations down to the grassroots and on the ground. Eric, can you share a bit of what you've done with the treaty bodies as well as with the UPR to actualize this Article 25? Sure. So first, it was kind of a matter of backing up and saying, where are we now in the US and how are we gonna get there? And we don't recognize the right to housing currently and the domestic law. And so we said, let's start with something that's a little more familiar to people. Right to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment in our constitution. There was a court case down in Miami, Conjurer versus Miami that said that if you're punishing somebody for sleeping and sheltering outside and they don't have any alternative place to be, then that's cruel and unusual punishment. And this standard had kind of existed in domestic law, but it wasn't widely applied and it needed some reinforcement. And so we said, let's go use some of these international mechanisms. There's a standard that's very parallel to that domestic standard of cruel and unusual. It's cruel and human integrating treatments at the international level. And let's build that up. Let's build up some language there that is parallel to this and then we can bring it back into our domestic organizing. And so we used first the special rapporteurs that Rob was mentioning. They have a little bit more flexibility in how they interpret international law. They can start to kind of get that language into some international documents. And then when we go to the treaty bodies, which are a little bit more formal, we've got a basis to say, look, you're not making up something new. The top international expert on the right to housing has already said this is cruel and unusual punishment or cruel and human integrating treatment. So just echo that there. They've already said that it's a racially discriminatory issue. The committee on elimination of racial discrimination just say it has racially discriminatory impact. So we use that to get it into the treaty bodies. And then from the treaty bodies, we then went to the universal periodic review, which is a more political process where other countries around the globe are reviewing that their peer countries on the international stage. And so we could then say to them again, this is not something that we're making up. This is actually something that's already been discussed by the treaty bodies. The U.S. has already been critiqued on this basis. So it's not as much of a stretch. You're not gonna be hitting them with something that they're not expecting. And in fact, the U.S. government, because of the work that we did through the treaty reviews, through the special repertoire visits, they had already actually said themselves that criminalization of homelessness may be a violation of our international human rights obligation. The first time that the U.S. government has actually acknowledged in a domestic setting that a domestic practice could be a international human rights violation. And so it was kind of just this back and forth between the international and the domestic. Using the special repertoire visit, as Rob said, to meet not just with people in the community, but to bring government representatives to hear from the people that they are experiencing these rights violations and to hear about them in the context of a rights violation. Going to the treaty bodies and bringing those standards back into conversations with the U.S. government and saying, this isn't just something that's gonna stay on paper in Geneva. This is something you need to be implementing. What are you doing to make sure these recommendations get put into practice? And so all, we just kept generating those international standards, bringing them back. And we got the federal government to create federal grant incentives to decriminalize homelessness. We got the Department of Justice to include investigations into criminalization of homelessness and their civil rights investigations. We got the Department of Justice to file a brief on behalf of people experiencing homelessness saying that, in fact, it is cruel and human or cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. And then that helped to generate a national court decision that's now the law of the land in the Ninth Circuit, first place of elsewhere, that is literally saving people's lives is protecting their rights to sleep and shelter themselves without harassment in the Ninth Circuit and beyond. And so we have actually succeeded in taking those international standards and making them meaningful in the enjoyment of human rights for individuals in the US. And that's the end goal. Mahalo, thank you so much. And Rob, I admire many aspects of your advocacy, but one of them that really always strikes me is your dedication to mentorship, to build the movement. And can you share a bit about your vision for the future of the right and why it's so important to engage with youth and participate the way you have to actualize these articles? So thank you, Josh. I always feel that the work that I'm doing, that Eric's doing and others involved in this work may not go under the results that we want to see in our lifetime, but we need to create a set of tools and a process that we could leave behind and say continue from this point and move forward. So it's been a mission of mine to bring more people into this work and Eric knows that somebody I've worked with for years, I always talk about human rights to the circle and how we need to widen that circle, right? We need to bring more people into understanding it. And in the beginning, I thought it was a challenge, but I've seen a shift over the last few years, more and more people talking about it and move from a slogan to a reality to people understanding, people wanting more education, more people willing to put themselves on the line and travel to Geneva and travel into courtrooms here in the US and challenge judges. So I think that's all part of the process, but I feel blessed that I've had mentorship from people like Eric, from many others. I can go on with a list of the group that escorted me, including yourself to the Universal Periodic Review in 2010 in Geneva. That was an incredible experience for me. And it was empowering and it said your voice matters and people respect your voice. I'll never forget the folks in the room saying to me, there's a delegate from a specific country, go tell him about homelessness in the US. You lived it, shared with that person so that when it's their turn to question their pay, they can put pressure on their peer country. So I think it's imperative that we create this toolbox that I like to call it, but also learning tools for people to continue to work because we may not actualize everything that we wanna stay before I'm no longer doing this part. It's true, it's trying to transformative toolkit and Eric definitely has a lot of the tools and so if you really utilize those using all the different ways. Eric, could you share a bit on your vision for the future? Cause you can see the committee on economic social and cultural rights coming up with general comments that expand on the elements. What is your idea of how you see us moving in our final moment? Really, I see it becoming a domestic practice. I see domestic advocates grappling more with what does it mean for the right to housing to be real in the US. I see lawyers doing it, I see grassroots advocates doing it, I see people living on the streets doing it and that's really how we operationalize it, how we make it a reality for everybody. I really wanna thank you both and just touching on all the transformative work that we're doing, the toolkit set it takes and really Article 25 demands a progressive realization based on the resources of each state and the wellbeing of each citizen's new measurement for what matters most for a meaningful life, food, clothing, housing, healthcare, absolutely crucial for a standard of living rooted in social justice. Thank you so much for all that you both do. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.