The Strategic Use of Human Rights Treaties in Hong Kong's Cage-Home Crisis: No Way Out?

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INTRODUCTION

Beneath the successful veneer of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), an underbelly within Asia's world city exists. Since the 1950s, an inhumane type of housing known locally as cage-homes with conditions unimaginable to an international audience has supplanted itself as the only option for citizens reliant on government assistance. ¹Cage-homes are inhabited by a highly marginalized group estimated to be as many as 200,000 in number.²Cage-homes encompass cubicle-flats, bed-space apartments, roof-top slums, and minuscule subdivided units. By any description, though, these are not homes at all. They are the embodiment of squalor--cramped, dank, dimly lit dwellings averaging 15 square feet in size.

With Hong Kong's growing wealth disparity,³rising property prices,⁴and a longstanding political ideology demonizing the poor, these subalterns are left to eke out lives in cage-like structures that permeate the landscape. Many arrived in their youth from mainland China in search of greater prosperity but found themselves socially immobile and "reified as a class of helpless and hopeless wretches." ⁵Despite their voiceless presence, cage tenants present a stark human rights challenge to a government fully cognisant that such dwellings "cast a dark shadow over [this] thriving city."⁶

In light of governmental inaction on the use of cage-homes, the phenomenon has attracted international scrutiny and condemnation. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), the body entrusted with monitoring compliance of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), has addressed a number of aspects of the right to housing. In 2001, the committee criticized Hong Kong for a "large number of older persons [who] continue to live in poverty without effective access to social services" ⁷stating it was "deeply concerned that the right to housing of many people in Hong Kong remains unfulfilled." Specifically, it described bed-space apartments and cage-homes as "an affront to human dignity" such structures "constitut[ing] a grave risk to the life and health of their inhabitants." ⁸The committee recommended that the HKSAR "give special attention to the impact of current policies ... on cage homes,"⁹further imploring "that Comprehensive Social Security Assistance levels permit recipients a reasonable standard of living consistent with articles 9 and 11 of the Covenant."¹⁰More...