All HIC Members, Friends and Partners are invited to sign World Assembly of Inhabitants’ Joint Declaration. The Assembly was held in Tunis during the World Social Forum 2015, with the participation of networks and organizations from all over the world. This document has been disseminated to gather the support of those sharing the declaration’s content and vision. You could also help us building a common path towards Habitat III. The document will also be shared with UN agencies involved in the preparations for Habitat III and with other decision makers at different levels.

We invite you to disseminate the Declaration on your website to collect more signatures in each country.

Please confirm your adherence to the Joint Declaration by sending your name, the name of your organization and your country to gs@hic-net.org

You will find the declaration below; it is also attached to this e-mail.

Declaration of
the World Assembly of Inhabitants

(WSF Tunis, 24-28 March
2015)

We, the participants of the World Assembly of Inhabitants,
gathered in Tunis from 24 to 28 March 2015, have met for many activities
grouped under seven themes during the World Social Forum to continue the
processes of convergence as in many previous gatherings including WAI 2013
(Tunis) and the People’s Alternative Social Urban Social Forum (Medellin, 2014).

First of all, we stand in solidarity with the people of Tunis
against fundamentalism and terrorism.

We, the under-signed women and men, organisations, networks and
movements of inhabitants of slums, neighbourhoods, settlements, cooperatives,
tenants and mortgaged homeowners, squatters, homeless, workers including the
informal ones, in urban and rural settings, therefore make the following
Declaration:

·
We re-affirm our responsibility and
commitment to the struggle for and
direct implementation of the principles of human rights, both
collective and individual, solidarity, peace, respect and dignity including social justice and equity through the
redistribution of wealth and the respect for the environment.

·
We accuse the real estate and land
speculation and re-affirm the urgency to replace the neo-liberal capitalist
system with one based upon collective ownership and
alternative forms of communal management that respects all forms of life, and
the recognition of the commons, the social production of habitat including the
alternative one, the social function of property, land and cities to establish
a more just, humane and sustainable habitat.

·
We are committed to the inclusion of
the inhabitants organisations and the whole civil society in planning processes and in putting in place alternative policies and practices that
give inhabitants the social function of cities and land where towns and
villages respond to the needs of their people, without discrimination, where
all live and works in security, dignity and in harmony with nature and the
environment. We are also committed with the rights of peasants and farmers to
land, water, food production and food sovereignty.

·
We demand the implementation of the
values and principles expressed in the right to the city that also respects the
well-being of people living in rural areas. We fight together
with indigenous peoples in rural and urban struggles against water and land
grabbing, privatisations, dispossessions, exploitation and oppression.

·
We
are committed to struggle and insist upon respect for the right to housing and
to the land, and enforcement of international instruments prohibiting forced
evictions, and support those norms affirming human rights related to habitat
and corresponding obligations of all organs of the state public authorities and
private actors. To this purpose, in particular, we call for cases to be
submitted to the International Tribunal of Evictions.

·
We call on all national and local
governments to establish constitutional rights to habitat and to adequate
housing, including affordable water and sanitation, and to respect and
guarantee such rights as
enforceable, whether constitutional or otherwise.

·
We support the construction of a
pan-African network of inhabitants’ organisations to counter oppression and
exploitation by local elites and neo-colonialism.

·
We stand in solidarity with all the
struggles and against the criminalisation of activists for the right to
housing, to land and to the city.

·
We resolve to continue to
strengthen local struggles with international solidarity and mobilisation.

This Declaration also seeks to promote dialogue with other
Convergence Assemblies in the WSF and all over the world to build global
convergence across all issues for another possible but better world. To further these goals, we resolve to strengthen the convergence
of inhabitants’ organisations via the exchange of experiences, sharing of
strategies, tools and a common agenda 2015-2017, and through the participation
in and outside the gatherings of the global elite.

To this purpose we are committed and call all the inhabitants organisations and networks to organise the World Urban Social Forum (Quito, October
2016), in order to debate and deliberate the implementation of policies for a clear alternative to the neoliberal and technocratic
approach of the UN Summit Habitat III, preparing it together from the local,
national, regional and international level.

Raising our concerns regarding
the UN Summit Habitat III preparatory process, its contents and resolutions, we
are committed to bring also there the Civil society and social movements voice and demands.

Additional information and signature:

International Alliance of
Inhabitants

www.habitants.org

e-mail: amh-wai2015@habitants.org

Habitat International
Coalition

hic-net.org

e-mail:gs@hic-net.org