Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Oak Hall Room 101

Miloon Kothari, former UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing and currently Visiting Scholar at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a leading voice at national, regional and international forums on human rights, especially economic, social and cultural rights. He served (from 2000-2008) as the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the Human Rights Council. During his tenure as Special Rapporteur Mr. Kothari led the process that resulted in the United Nations Basic Principles and Guidelines on Development based Evictions and Displacement – the current global operational human rights standard on the practice of forced evictions.

An architect by training, Mr. Kothari is the founder and former coordinator of the South Asian Regional Programme of the Habitat International Coalition’s Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN). In recent years, he has been particularly active on issues such as Women’s rights to land, inheritance, property, housing and globalization, trade liberalization and its impact on human rights and the UPR. Since 2009, Mr. Kothari has contributed significantly, as founding member and convener (from 2009-2013) to the Working Group on Human Rights in India and the UN (WGHR), a national alliance that is particularly active on the UPR. He has recently been elected President of UPR Info.