Rights groups urge Supreme Court to maintain 2015 stay on katchi abadi evictions

ISLAMABAD: Human rights campaigners, political activists, lawyers and residents at a meeting organised by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) on Tuesday called on superior court judges to preserve the Supreme Court’s 2015 stay order against summary evictions of katchi abadis, saying this was necessary to protect the constitutional right to housing for the urban working poor.

According to an HRCP statement, the meeting took place amid an ongoing demolition campaign by the Capital Development Authority (CDA) that participants said was being carried out in violation of the Supreme Court stay order. The statement said the operation had affected Muslim and Christian katchi abadis in different parts of the federal capital, as well as old villages including Saidpur, Malpur and Nurpur Shahan.

The HRCP, the All-Pakistan Alliance for Katchi Abadis, the National Commission for Justice and Peace, the Awami Workers Party, Aurat March Islamabad and other groups said the CDA’s conduct reflected its failure to address the housing requirements of low-income residents.

The statement said the CDA had introduced only one low-income housing project since the start of the century, at Alipur Farash in a rural area, and that it had provided accommodation to only a few hundred households. This, the participants said, was far below the needs of the nearly 500,000 people living in katchi abadis in Islamabad.

Participants said the authority’s failure to create formal low-cost housing should have led it to accept informal settlements that had emerged through the efforts of working-class families. Instead, they said, the CDA had continued demolition drives that were leaving thousands without shelter and worsening an already serious shortage of affordable housing for poor residents.

Call for legal protection and due process

The statement said Islamabad was the only city in Pakistan without a comprehensive system for recognising informal settlements, based on the widely accepted principle that regularisation should apply in most cases and resettlement should be used only as a last option.

In the absence of parliamentary legislation to address this issue, the participants said it was the responsibility of the superior courts to ensure that poor residents of the capital were not left at the mercy of unelected officials.

Those attending the meeting said the right to housing, protected under Article 9 of the Constitution, was non-negotiable. They said the CDA and other state institutions should be held accountable and must stop summary evictions, as well as what they described as contempt of court through repeated breaches of stay orders.

The meeting also demanded an end to the demolition of homes in Islamabad’s villages on the grounds that the land had been acquired decades earlier during the construction of the capital.

Participants said that even where the CDA maintained it had legal documents supporting its claim to land occupied by village residents, there was no basis for forcible evictions and that legal procedure had to be observed.