The Right to Housing within the Social Safety Net : A Legal Analysis of Individual Rights and Public Responsibility

The right to housing is a human right expressed in the Swedish constitution as well as in international human rights conventions. In Sweden, however, the right to housing is not expressed as an enforceable right that individuals can request to have realised by public authorities or courts. Instead, the objective of the Swedish housing policy and the regulation on the right to housing has been that everyone should be able to demand good housing on the general housing market. The purpose of this thesis is to examine and analyse the legal responsibility of the central and local government to realise the right to housing for individuals who cannot arrange housing themselves. The intention is that the thesis thereby will uncover legal contradictions, ambiguities or other shortcomings that may lead to a risk that the right to housing is not realised for everyone. Methodologically, the starting point is a view of law, inspired primarily by Kaarlo Tuori’s theory on critical legal positivism, as consisting of two dimensions. In addition to a normative legal order, law also consists of legal practices. The legal order, in turn, is regarded as a multi-layered normative order: in addition to the surface level with individual legal rules, the legal order also consists of deeper levels where legal elements such as general legal principles and human rights as general normative ideas are found. The responsibility to realise the right to housing is analysed in the light of international law as well as national law. According to international law, Sweden has a responsibility to recognize and realise the right to housing for everyone. According to national law, no public authority has a clear responsibility to realise the right to housing for individuals in need. Instead, the right to housing is to be realised through several different legal frameworks that are analysed in the thesis. Firstly the right to financial housing support within the framework of social insurance. Secondly municipalities’ responsibility for housing provision. Thirdly the local social services ultimate responsibility to support individuals in need. The overall conclusion of the thesis is that the legal framework regarding the responsibility of the central and local government to realise the right to housing for those who cannot arrange housing themselves does not constitute a coherent social safety net. The support that individuals who are unable to acquire housing themselves are entitled to has the nature of emergency assistance and shelter, rather than housing of a long-term nature. Furthermore, assistance in the form of housing is often time-limited and subject to far-reaching requirements that individuals, for example, must try to acquire a home on their own. The regulation thus means that individuals who need housing and cannot arrange housing themselves risk being without state support. This is problematic if the right to housing is to be realised for everyone. How these problems are to be solved is a matter for the legislator, but this thesis contributes with knowledge of legal problems that the legal regulation entails. These problems should be addressed and the right to housing taken seriously, by all the actors involved, if the right to housing is to be realised