Serde Atalay

This thesis examines whether international law is sufficiently equipped for a sound conceptualization of migrants’ and refugees’ right to access housing beyond a minimalistic paradigm. Itaims to assess the potential and shortcomings of this right in counteracting the manner in which power is exercised in migration law, policy, and politics to instrumentalize housing against migrants and refugees. Of particular importance to the examination are migrants and refugees who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, given their increased vulnerability to housing exclusion and precarity. The investigation is crucial and urgent because, in reverse proportion to the key role played by housing in migrants’ and refugees’ life trajectories and inclusion, legal research into their right to access housing has been scant. The thesis focuses on three provisions in international law which are the primary sources of migrants’ and refugees’ right to access housing and state obligations deriving therefrom: article 11(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), article 21 of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (‘the Refugee Convention’), and article 43 of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (ICRMW), taken alone and together with the non-discrimination provisions of each treaty (article 2(2), ICESCR; article 3, Refugee Convention; article 7, ICRMW). The ambition of this thesis is to show that interpretations of the right to access housing that prioritize the interests of migrants and refugees over states’ sovereign anxieties are possible in international law. To do so, the thesis works with the indeterminacy of rights. The argument is developed in five substantive chapters. Chapter 2 lays bare the ideological and distributive stakes inherent to any interpretation of the right to access housing and empirically grounds the key point that issues faced by migrants and refugees in access to housing and the discriminatory exclusion that they suffer from have a structural nature. Based on this premise, chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on interpreting article 11(1) of the ICESCR, article 21 of the Refugee Convention, and article 43 of the ICRMW, respectively. Chapter 6 answers the question of whether article 2(2) of the ICESCR, article 3 of the Refugee Convention, and article 7 of the ICRMW can accommodate an intersectional lens to understanding and addressing the discrimination faced by migrants and refugees in access to housing. The chief finding of the thesis is that the promise of substantive conceptions of migrants’ and refugees’ right to access housing sits side by side with a systemic self-constraint either embedded in the investigated treaties or exercised by the bodies tasked with interpreting them. Embedded limitations are a feature of the Refugee Convention and the ICRMW whose nature of rightsprotection are so carefully tailored as to escape progressive articulations. Institutionally imposed limitations are observed within the ICESCR system despite the rich interpretative possibilities that the ICESCR offers. The thesis develops arguments to subvert those limitations and shows that international law is yet to fulfil its promise of a life lived in peace and dignity in a safe home for migrants and refugees.