On Wednesday the 11th December Housing Rights Watch organized a seminar in Warsaw for Polish FEANTSA members and some other organizations working on housing in Poland such as Habitat for Humanity Poland. The representative of FEANTSA Polish organisations, Jakub Wilczek helped in the preparation of this seminar. See here the final agenda.
Maria Aldanas, Policy Officer at FEANTSA, spoke about the rights-based approach to homelessness and basic concepts and elements of the right to housing. She also gave an institutional Overview of Advocacy and Litigation mechanisms. [Presentation]. Other lectures were given by Warsaw University professors Adam Ploszka (regular contributor to Housing Rights Watch) and Ryszard Szarfenberg (who collaborates with EAPN Poland). A representative of the office of the Polish Ombudsman, Kamilla Dołowska, gave a presentation on their work in favour of homeless people. She is chairperson of the Commission for the rights of Homeless People within the Ombudsman office. Finally, the lawyer and activist Beata Siemieniako spoke about the defense of the rights of vulnerable tenants in Warsaw.
It was really interesting to have the homeless sector and the organizations that protect the rights of tenants in the same room. They shared objectives such as making sure of the existence of more social housing in Poland. Ultimately, and this is important in the Polish context, the organisations seriously started to discuss their advocacy role.
We conceive of training as a means for improving the awareness about the human rights-based approach to homelessness and we intend to replicate this training course in other European Countries.
English
Events
Subject:
Human rights
Right to housing
rights-based approach
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