COR Point 50 The Right to Housing (ICESCR Article 11)
The Government does not have a Unified Standard to Define Homelessness and Underestimates the Number of Homeless Persons
It is impossible to grasp the actual degree of homelessness based on the Taiwan government’s existing legal definition of homeless and the government gravely underestimates homelessness.
Taiwan’s current legal construction and policy methods regardless homelessness are based on Article 17 of the Public Assistance Act.108 Article 17 of the Public Assistance Act does not have a definition of homeless but only refers to “homeless persons who have no home.” This vague, sweeping and unclear definition of homeless leads city and county governments to formulate their own definitions of homeless and thus creates a multiplicity of “standards for homelessness.” For example, many cities and counties have enacted homeless shelter and guidance regulations (or self-governance statutes) which define beggars as homeless persons or, as the State report mentioned, uses the number of street people on the streets, in parks, train stations or tunnels to calculate the number of homeless, but does not include people who are staying in shelters in such estimates.
Homeless Shelter Agencies Are Gravely Inadequate and Lack Pluralistic Guidance Mechanisms
The State report’s response (see Paragraph 162) to Point 50 of the Concluding Observations and Recommendations relates that, from January through September 2015, cities and county governments in Taiwan registered a total of 2,644 homeless persons. However, a research report written by Professors Cheng Li-an and Lin Wan-Yi of the Department of Social Work of National Taiwan University on commission for the Ministry of the Interior found that 10 shelter institutions set up on eight cities and counties where homeless people congregate had a total of 340 beds regularly available for homeless persons and, at most, 415 beds. From this finding, it is clear that the number of beds in shelters is gravely deficient. At the same time, the shelter services in homeless shelter institutions in Taiwan mainly provide only living resettlement services and gravely lack differentiated services, such as female shelters and assistance for rehabilitation from drug or alcohol addiction. Shelters should be established with distinct focuses to cope with different types of needs faced by homeless people.109
The international Experts recommended that the government should provide homeless persons with basic living assistance, including housing. According to Article 4 of the Housing Act, homeless people are suitable subjects for social housing. In addition, the “Housing Subsidies in 2013” program of the Construction and Planning Agency of the Ministry of the Interior was administrated by the development bureaus of city and county governments and included rent subsidies for which homeless persons could apply.110 Even though the Housing Act clearly identified homeless persons as being suitable subjects for its application, the settlement policies adopted by most government agencies remain focussed on short-term shelter services. In addition, the Public Assistance Act and regulations to facilitate assistance to homeless persons (or self-governance acts) adopted by local administrations still do not include housing agencies among the key government offices responsible for implementation.
The Difficulties faced by Homeless Persons in the Rental Housing Market
The rehabilitation services mentioned in the State Report’ response to Points 50-51 of the Concluding Observations and Recommendations (Paragraph 163 Section 3) require homeless persons to link their rental location with their household registration before they can apply for rent subsidies. However, homeless people frequently are unable to find housing due to excessively high rents, refusals by landlords or excessive distance from their place of work.
Requirement for Household Registration Restricts Access to Welfare Services
Many cities and counties only provide homeless people who do not have household registrations in their jurisdictions with emergency services when the physical safety of such homeless people is threatened or provide short-term emergency shelter services. Local governments usually require homeless people who need other social welfare resources to return to the place of their household registration and allow those local governments provide assistance.
Expulsions of Street People
Besides providing assistance for the essential needs of homeless persons, the government should also ensure that the fundamental right of survival of homeless persons is not subjected to infringement. In recent years, the government has often used the pretexts of maintaining the appearance of the city or the promotion of urban development as justification for the use of all kinds of methods, including water cannon, adding rails to chairs, throwing away the family belongings of homeless persons or other means to drive away homeless people. In 2015, there was even a case in which a homeless person attempted to commit suicide after being expelled by government and private companies.111 This kind of “out of sight, out of mind” expulsion policy cannot make the poor disappear and will instead further infringe on the basic human rights of the poor.
Civil society organizations have frequently urged the government to provide lockers or other facilities for homeless persons to store their belongings. On October 20, 2015, the MOHW stated in the sixth meeting of the second round of discussions for the Second State Report on the two covenants that it had an administrative policy to “provide locker storage services” as an essential need for homeless people. However, most homeless people have not yet heard of the locker services mentioned by the MOHW and still lack any place to safety store their belongings and thus constantly live under the fear that their belongings could be thrown away as garbage. On November 5, civil society organizations asked the MOHW to provide a concrete explanation of its locker storage service for homeless persons, including the locations, number of lockers and their format. On November 17, the MOHW issued an official document stating that it had invited all city and county governments to take their own actions to respond to the query by CSOs. Obviously, the MOHW did not have a clear grasp of the situation and its statement that it had already provided locker and storage space services was only a hypocritical response to the question raised by CSOs.112
- See http://law.moj.gov.tw/Eng//LawClass/LawContent.aspx?pcode=D0050078.
- Cheng Li-chen and Lin Wan-yi (2013), “Research Studies on the Situation of Homeless People” (research report commissioned by Ministry of Interior in Chinese), p.53.
- See http://goo.gl/teI6MT (in Chinese).
- See “No Place to Store: The Only Option is to Pull Your Baggage and Run,” Apple Daily (Taiwan), December 8, 2015 (in Chinese).
- The document issued by the Taipei City Department of Social Welfare on November 25, 2015 to the Taiwan Homeless Society related that the department had no plans to build locker facilities but was based on a document No. 104004013 issued by the Ministry of Health and Welfare on November 17, 2015. Please refer to http://ppt.cc/9UX0K.