The Right to a Nationality and the Right to Adequate Housing housed. 8 100 million people around the world are thought to be homeless,9 untold millions live in conditions that threaten their health and human dignity, and millions more face forced evictions or threats of such evictions every year. 10 Like the right to a nationality, the right to adequate housing is interconnected with other rights and can be the cause and consequence of additional human rights violations. Access to housing and proof of residency can be a requirement for the enjoyment of other rights, such as the right to work, to study, to vote or to privacy. 11 Discrimination that deprives persons of adequate housing and subjects them to forced evictions can lead to the violation of these and other rights. Like those facing violations of the right to a nationality, persons experiencing violations of the right to adequate housing are often among societies’ most marginalised; they have been described as ‘invisible, banished to the peripheries of cities and towns, out of sight’. 12 Certain populations are especially vulnerable to violations of this right, and it has been noted that ‘women, children, youth, older persons, indigenous people, ethnic and other minorities, and other vulnerable individuals and groups all suffer disproportionately from the practice of forced evictions’. 13 These groups are not just disproportionately vulnerable to forced evictions; rather, they are more likely to suffer a range of violations related to the right to adequate housing, which include living in substandard housing, residing in segregated areas without access to basic amenities, and homelessness or extreme housing insecurity. These groups are also often disproportionately affected by poverty and can face discrimination due to both poverty and their membership in one or many of these groups, which further limits enjoyment of the right to adequate housing. 14 While it has been recognised that ethnic minorities and ‘other vulnerable individuals and groups’ are especially prone to violations of this right, 15 and one might infer that stateless persons are included among these groups, little research has explicitly focused on the right to adequate housing for stateless persons. These situations of invisibility intersect when stateless persons are denied the right to adequate housing. Stateless persons face discrimination and barriers imposed by both the state and private actors in initially accessing and remaining securely in adequate shelter. These include, but are not limited to, discriminatory lending practices, the threat and execution of forced evictions and physical 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Miloon Kothari, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing as a Component of the Right to an Adequate Standard of Living, UN Doc E/CN.4/2005/48 (21 March 2005) 1, 2. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Report on the Sixth Session, UN ESCOR, 6th sess, Agenda Item 10, Supp No 3, UN Doc E/1992/23 (13 December 1991) 114 annex III (General Comment No 4: The Right to Adequate Housing (Art 11(1) of the Covenant)) [4] (‘General Comment No 4’). Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, Forced Evictions: Violations of Human Rights (Global Survey No 9, 2003) 12. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, The Right to Adequate Housing (Fact Sheet No 21, November 2009) 9 (‘The Right to Adequate Housing’). Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Info Note: Homelessness and Human Rights (A/HRC/31/54) (Report Summary, 2016) 2. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, UN ESCOR, 16th sess, Supp No 2, UN Doc E/1998/22 (20 May 1997) 115 annex IV (General Comment No 7: The Right to Adequate Housing (Article 11.1 of the Covenant): Forced Evictions) [11] (‘General Comment No 7’). Mutuma Ruteere, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racial Intolerance, UN GAOR, 68th sess, Agenda Item 67(b), UN Doc A/68/333 (19 August 2013) 7 [20]. General Comment No 7, UN Doc E/1998/22 (n 13) 115 [11]. 241