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The Climate Change and Displacement Initiative is a four-year year Initiative (2009- 2012) designed to find practical and viable housing, land and property solutions for climate displaced persons.
The Coastal Kids Project will be carried out from 2012-2015 and initially connect schools and students living in coastal areas in Bangladesh with schools and students in Australia who are also coastal dwellers. Using communications technology such as Skype and other forms of internet-based connections and learning, the Coastal Kids Project will bring children from these countries into direct face-to-face contact during which time they can discuss the reality of climate change, learn how climate change is affecting them and what kids in all of these countries can do to better understand the needs and wishes of coastal kids everywhere. In time, the Coastal Kids Project will seek to involve six to eight schools from other countries that are also vulnerable to climate change.
Since its establishment in 2006, Displacement Solutions has been active in exploring the housing, land and property rights situation in Myanmar. The Myanmar HLP Initiative aims to shed new light on the numerous HLP rights issues in Burma today by building capacity for enforcing these rights by citizens of the country. The Initiative works together with various groups within and outside Myanmar towards these ends.
The War Crimes and the Home Initiative will provide the first comprehensive reference source on the potential application of international humanitarian and criminal law against perpetrators of housing, land and property rights abuses manifesting as crimes against humanity and war crimes. Recent developments in the field of international humanitarian and criminal law involving the prosecution of war criminals and those who have committed crimes against humanity will increasingly enable the international community to hold those ordering abuses of HLP rights accountable.
Displacement Solutions offers training courses and post-graduate and graduate-level academic courses on a variety of issues. Courses can vary in length from several hours on a single day to in-depth semester-long courses given within a University setting.
Some 100,000 Bhutanese refugees (Lhotshampas) have been living in exile in eastern Nepal since the early 1990s after being denied citizenship rights by the government in Bhutan. This project will investigate what rights those Bhutanese refugees who are opting for third country resettlement have under international law, what alternative compensation might be developed in lieu of HLP restitution, and what creative rights-based solutions could be implemented to secure the HLP rights of those opting for third country resettlement.
The Disability and Displacement Initiative will attempt to close the legal protection gap for disabled and displaced persons through a series of carefully developed outputs designed to significantly raise the rights profile of this group, leading to concrete changes in the way by which displaced people with disabilities are treated during displacement.
The 2005 UN Principles on Housing and Property Restitution for Refugees and Displaced Persons – or as they are more widely known – The Pinheiro Principles – are a universally applicable international legal standard designed to protect the rights of refugees and displaced persons everywhere to return to their original homes or, when this is not possible, to receive just and satisfactory compensation adequate to replace their housing, land and property (HLP) losses. The full text of the Pinheiro Principles in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish are available.
