Chameli Singh v State of Uttar Pradesh (1995)

This is the fullest Indian statement of the right to shelter as a human right, and it is the case in which the Court set out, side by side, the two international provisions on an adequate standard of living. If you can reproduce the content the Court poured into the word shelter, you have the answer to any question on the right to housing.

It also has a useful shape for a problem question, because the petitioners lost. The land was acquired. A right to shelter for one group was vindicated by taking land from another. That tension is worth noticing rather than hiding.

The petitioners' lands were acquired for the purpose of providing housing facilities for Scheduled Castes. The petitioners challenged the notification on the ground that the acquisition would destroy their agricultural livelihood.

The Court rejected the challenge to the acquisition, while finding merit in the petitioners' factual complaints about the compensation procedure. In doing so it relied on human rights instruments alongside the constitutional provisions.

Article 25(1) of the Universal Declaration declares that "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services".

Article 11(1) of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights provides that the States Parties recognise "the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions", and that they will take appropriate steps to ensure the realisation of this right.

Note the difference between the two, which an examiner may reward. The Declaration states an entitlement. The Covenant states a recognition plus an undertaking to take steps. That difference is the difference between a declaration and a treaty of progressive realisation, and it runs through the whole of Module 2.

This is the passage to learn. The Court held that the right to life guaranteed in any civilised society implies the right to food, water, a decent environment, education, medical care and shelter, and that these are basic human rights known to any civilised society; that all the civil, political, social and cultural rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration and in the Conventions, or under the Constitution of India, cannot be exercised without these basic human rights.

It then unpacked shelter. Shelter for a human being is not a mere protection of his life and limb. It is a home, where he has opportunities to grow physically, mentally, intellectually and spiritually. The right to shelter therefore "includes adequate living space, safe and decent structure, clean and decent surroundings, sufficient light, pure air and water, electricity, sanitation and other civic amenities like roads etc. so as to have easy access to his daily avocation". A right to shelter is not a right to a roof over one's head; it is a right to all the infrastructure necessary to enable a person to live and develop as a human being. And the right to shelter, used as an essential requisite of the right to live, is to be deemed to have been guaranteed as a fundamental right.

Learn the list of components. It is the sort of enumeration that converts directly into marks: living space, structure, surroundings, light, air, water, electricity, sanitation, roads.

Two moves, and the second is the more interesting.

The first move is derivation. The right to life cannot be the right to bare survival, because a person surviving without water, air, sanitation or shelter is not living in any sense the Constitution recognises. So the necessities are read into Article 21. That is the standard technique of the post-Maneka Gandhi jurisprudence.

The second move is the priority claim. The Court did not say merely that these basic rights are as important as the rest. It said the rest cannot be exercised without them. Freedom of expression is of no use to a person with no shelter and no water; the vote is of no use to somebody who cannot survive to the polling day. This is the strongest form of the indivisibility argument - not that both categories of rights matter, but that the economic and social rights are logically prior to the exercise of the civil and political ones.

Set that against the Tehran Proclamation quoted in the Asiad workers case, which puts the same point the other way round: the full realisation of civil and political rights without the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights is impossible. Two courts, two formulations, one proposition.

The petitioners were landowners whose agricultural livelihood was to be destroyed so that Scheduled Caste families could be housed. Both sides were asserting an aspect of the right to life. The Court preferred the housing claim and confined its relief to the compensation procedure.

That is not a flaw in the reasoning; it is what happens when a resource-dependent right is enforced. Somebody has to supply the resource. Saying so in an answer, briefly, shows that you understand why the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is framed in terms of progressive realisation to the maximum of available resources rather than in the immediate terms of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.