ABOUT DISPLACEMENT SOLUTIONS
Displacement Solutions (DS) works with climate displaced persons, communities, governments and the UN to find rights-based land solutions to climate displacement. DS also works to empower displaced people and refugees to exercise their right to return and have restored to them their original homes, lands and properties through reliance on the right to restitution. DS works together with and on behalf of people who have been displaced not only by conflict, forced eviction or other human rights abuses, but also natural disaster, climate change or other circumstances beyond their control. DS assists in finding alternative solutions such as compensation or relocation if this is their wish.
DS does not believe in simply blaming governments responsible for human rights abuses. We take human rights work one-step further to solve situations where forcibly displaced people have lost their homes. DS offers practical guidance on how to reduce, eliminate or redress such abuses. This is done through development of institutional and policy frameworks, legal advocacy, training, research and media.
Displacement Solutions is dedicated to ensuring that all displaced persons can be provided with the most viable options to returning home within the shortest possible time. These objectives are pursued through two parallel tracks: building and maintaining the world’s only Housing Land and Property Rights (HLP) Expert Registry and Proactive Catalytic HLP Projects.
The HLP Expert Registry enables the organisation to draw on the world’s leading HLP rights experts and to dispatch HLP rights practitioners to post-conflict and post-disaster settings on short notice. These HLP Rights Teams work closely with other peace and post-disaster operations to provide the expertise required to ensure that housing, land and property rights issues are properly addressed. The HLP Rights Teams drawn from the Registry are carefully tailored to fit the particular problems in affected countries. Having the ability to quickly compose these teams considerably improves the responses of the international community to these crises, and facilitates the search for solutions. The Registry currently contains the names and curricula vitae of over 170 of the world’s leading HLP practitioners
Since 2006, members of the Registry have been requested for deployment to Aceh, Bangladesh, Colombia, DR Congo, Fiji, Georgia, Kiribati, Maldives, Montenegro, Myanmar, Nepal, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Serbia, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor Leste, Tuvalu, US, and others.
Proactive Catalytic HLP Projects involve innovative policy guidance papers, training, media and national HLP Initiatives, each of which have been very carefully selected to achieve maximum global impact and to be of the widest possible application. They build on a range of positive developments concerning housing, land and property rights in conflict and disaster settings in recent years, and are results-oriented and original in approach and methodology. Through field-level HLP initiatives as well as policy guidance papers, training programmes and documentary films, these proactive projects will continue to build the institutional, normative, and conceptual basis for further action on resolving displacement situations around the world.
DS is registered as a non-profit association in Geneva, Switzerland.
Whether you're a lawyer, volunteer or a benefactor, you can help us find rights-based solutions to displacement.