01 February 2006

United Nations Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing, Miloon Kothari will later today, Wednesday 1st February, criticise the human rights record of five countries affected by the December 26th 2004 tsunami, at the launch of a major study into human rights abuse since the disaster.

He will say: "This report demonstrates that even in the face of such an overwhelming tragedy, governments have failed to uphold the human rights to food, health, housing and livelihoods of their most vulnerable citizens."

Miloon Kothari will be making his comments at the United Nations headquarters in New York at the launch of Tsunami Response – A Human Rights Assessment. The report, by international charities ActionAid, PDHRE and HIC-HLRN,  is unprecedented in the scope of its research, covering five countries, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives and Indonesia and representing the experiences of over 50,000 people – all of them survivors of the tsunami.

The 64-page report is an indictment of  the behaviour since the disaster of all five of these governments and includes examples of:

In India – the failure of the government to provide food, water and shelter to people of a low caste, while others received emergency help.

In Thailand – the government allowing major commercial interests to displace villagers from their traditional homes and instead allowing the building of hotels.

In the Maldives – the government providing uninhabitable accommodation, often with unusable toilets due to unfinished sewerage and waste disposal.

In Sri Lanka – the government only providing compensation in the name of men, not women. In some cases this has included payments to ex husbands rather to the women raising families who need it most.

In Indonesia – the government failing to provide safe emergency shelter which has resulted in women being exposed to sexual assault.

Ramesh Singh, chief executive of ActionAid International said today: "The findings of this research are shocking – emergency help should reach all those who need it, not a selected few. Morally, this is what the world expects, and legally this is what governments are obliged to do. They should be ashamed of their record over the last year and we urge them to immediately take action to stop these human rights abuses."