COHRE is involved in various housing rights projects in Europe. COHRE works directly with a wide network of partner organisations and governments in the region to promote and protect housing rights. We monitor forced evictions taking place across Europe, carry out training programmes, conduct advocacy work, provide legal assistance and advice to grassroots communities and attend regional and expert meetings taking place at the European level.

COHRE produced a publication on Enforcing Housing Rights in Europe, which clarifies how European human rights mechanisms, and in particular the European Court of Human Rights, may be used to protect the housing rights in Europe. COHRE has also produced a documentary film on housing discrimination against Roma communities in Belgrade, Serbia.

COHRE designed housing and property restitution laws and institutions in Georgia and Kosovo on behalf of international agencies, including the establishment of the Kosovo Housing and Property Directorate, and worked with the Albanian parliament to develop property and housing laws.

COHRE regularly partners with and assists national-level non-governmental organisations in Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe and South-Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia. In Europe, COHRE has a particular focus on the housing rights of Roma, Travellers, the homeless, refugees, returnees and people living with HIV/AIDS, as well as inheritance rights of women in South-Eastern Europe.

Since COHRE has been granted participatory status with the Council of Europe in early 2004, it has provided, together with the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), a periodic counter-report on Roma and housing rights in several European countries (Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Romania and Hungary) to the European Committee on Social Rights. The legal submissions urged the Committee to make a series of recommendations to governments to improve living conditions and cease the practice of forced evictions.

For more information contact:


Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions
83 rue de Montbrillant, 1202 Geneva
Telephone: +41.22.734.1028
Fax: +41.22.733.8336
E-mail: litigation@cohre.org