Thursday, February 24, 2011

In the 'Human Rights' Utopia Deadbeat Tenants Have Rights, Landlords Not So Much

Because the new "human rights" ethos privileges the rights of the deadbeat "underdog" over the rights of priviledged property-owners (property rights having been purposely and purposefully omitted from Canada's Trudeaupian "rights" charter), tenants from hell with rights galore and rights-starved Ontario landlords are the new norm. (Thanks, Babsy Hall.) And, oh look, same thing's happening across the pond, too. From the Daily Mail:
Evicting a woman from her council home for failing to pay rent would breach her human rights, judges ruled yesterday.

Town Hall chiefs wanted to evict Rebecca Powell, who receives thousands of pounds in benefits, after she ran up more than £3,500 in arrears on the accommodation she was given because she was homeless.

But the Supreme Court said that – under the controversial European Convention on Human Rights – this would be a breach of the right to ‘respect for a person’s home’.

Council leaders and the Government had fought the case and fear it may now be harder to evict thousands of council tenants who fall into arrears.

Legal experts said there was an increasing ‘trend’ for tenants – including ‘neighbours from hell’ – to use human rights law to thwart eviction...
Can you blame them? Even deadbeats are smart enough to go with what works. The predictable fallout from all this: people will run, not walk, to get out of the landlord game, and the governenment will have to step into the breach and supply more public housing (which, a cynic may say, is the real reason for endowing deadbeats with housing "rights").

2 comments:

John said...

It gets worse. George Monbiot (is there a greater idiot?) suggests the government use the citizen's "housing footprint" to measure how much real estate a person is occupying and have the government tax the excess or force the extra rooms to be shared.

"While most houses are privately owned, the total housing stock is a common resource. Either we ensure that it is used wisely and fairly, or we allow its distribution to become the starkest expression of inequality."
http://www.monbiot.com/2011/01/03/home-rule/

scaramouche said...

Well, that sounds fair. But the people in the Politburo, they get to have a nice dacha on the Baltic, right?