Abusing Poor Folks Like It’s 1894, Daily Brief May 29, 2024

Three generations of Bashir Husain’s family ran a small shop in a Karachi market in Pakistan. For 70 years, they paid rent to the local government, as well as utility bills and taxes.

But in 2018, the authorities demolished Husain’s family shop.

It was part of something called an “anti-encroachment” drive, and it’s all too common in Pakistan. In short, the authorities want to use a space for something else – or give it to someone else – and so they say they are removing structures that “encroach” on public lands or state property.

Now, governments are allowed to expropriate land, including evicting people from their property, if it’s in the public interest and in other exceptional circumstances. What’s happening in cities across Pakistan, however, looks a lot more what international law calls “forced eviction,” and many have been made homeless by it.

You shouldn’t just push individuals and families from their homes and business premises “without the provision of, and access to, appropriate forms of legal or other protection.”

In a new report, Human Rights Watch found the authorities frequently fail to take the proper steps beforehand. They often don’t look into the land rights of residents, and they provide little if any compensation.

In some cases, the police arrest and prosecute those who resist without any lawful basis. Police who carry out abusive evictions never face any penalties.

Corruption in land development sometimes drives abuses. The rich and well-connected take advantage of poor and socially marginalized families, who often have only a patchy paper trail to prove ownership. Much of this concerns properties hastily allotted to refugees arriving from India after the Partition of British India into two new countries, India and Pakistan, in August 1947.

But the problem goes back even further than that. The basis for public land acquisition in the country is the Land Acquisition Act, a colonial-era law from 1894. That law, and various other laws based on it, enable authorities to forcibly evict people from their homes and lands with few if any safeguards.

Clearly, reforming the law is long overdue. If it is sometimes necessary to get people to move, it should be planned and carried out in a way that respects people’s rights to housing and livelihoods. There should be adequate compensation and resettlement options.

In short, the colonial-era law is not fit for purpose.