Suchergebnisse

Current global trends are putting increasing economic pressure on land and natural resources, raising the risk that new waves of internal displacement may be caused by the combined forces of climate change and large-scale investment in agriculture. Adapted from the source document.

By post-conflict standards, Libya has relatively few internally displaced persons (IDPs) but many of these, including several entire displaced communities, face the prospect of protracted internal displacement. For households that remain displaced within their own towns due to the wartime destruction of their homes, durable solutions are largely contingent on reconstruction. However, for IDPs displaced away from their places of origin, inability to access prewar homes and properties is merely a symptom of the broader insecurity that has blocked virtually all return to date. In most cases, IDPs also face significant insecurity of tenure in their current locations. Adapted from the source document.

Discusses Guiding Principle 29, which maintains that internally displaced persons (IDPs) have the right to reclaim abandoned property/possessions or to receive appropriate compensation. Efforts to restore the property rights of approximately 200,000 homes that belonged to people displaced in Bosnia provided the first real precedent for large-scale post-conflict property restitution & helped to shape Principle 29. Challenges to restitution efforts are examined & current restitution plans being considered for Colombia, Iraq, & victims of the 2004 tsunami are examined. Adapted from the source document.

ABSTRACTThe restitution of property to refugees and displaced persons (RDPs) who fled their homes during the 1992 to 1995 conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been highly successful on its own terms. After getting off to a slow start in the immediate post‐war years, this process saw the return of more than 200,000 claimed properties to their pre‐war residents by mid‐2004. Although property restitution has facilitated durable solutions for RDPs who have benefited from it, these durable solutions have not exclusively taken the form of voluntary and permanent return. In many cases, RDPs have chosen instead to sell, exchange, or lease their restituted homes in order to finance voluntary internal resettlement in parts of the country other than their pre‐war places of residence. In all cases, however, property restitution has been crucial to the viability and sustainability of either return or resettlement, facilitating free and informed choices by RDPs regarding their future. Property restitution in Bosnia and Herzegovina has often been held up as a model for other post‐conflict settings characterized by mass‐displacement. However, the utility of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an example must be assessed in light of favourable domestic and international factors that are unlikely to be repeated in other contexts. This paper argues that these factors should not disqualify Bosnia and Herzegovina as an example, but should instead underscore the importance that lessons learned in Bosnia and Herzegovina be incorporated early in the planning of other peace missions and implemented consistently. One of the foremost of these lessons was the efficacy of shifting the focus from the highly politicized concept of return to a more impartial "rule of law" approach, connoting an emphasis on individuals' rights to their former homes. The unusual level of resources that allowed the international community to correct its own early mistakes would not have been enough to guarantee property restitution in the absence of this successful implementation strategy.

Claims to land and territory are often a cause of conflict, and land issues present some of the most contentious problems for post-conflict peacebuilding. Among the land-related problems that emerge during and after conflict are the exploitation of land-based resources in the absence of authority, the disintegration of property rights and institutions, the territorial effect of battlefield gains and losses, and population displacement. In the wake of violent conflict, reconstitution of a viable land-rights system is crucial: an effective post-conflict land policy can foster economic recover