40 years of housing rights advocacy: a conversation with Scott Leckie

Join us for a reflective conversation between Scott Leckie, a leading human rights practitioner with more than 40 years of advocating for housing rights, and Dr Koldo Casla, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing and Senior Lecturer in International Human Rights Law at the University of Essex.

They will discuss how the international housing rights community has evolved in this time, past, present and future challenges, and opportunities to bring about the necessary changes to improve access to housing globally.

Scott Leckie is the Director of Displacement Solutions, a Geneva-based NGO working to assist people displaced form their homes due to conflict or climate change. He has more than four decades of advocacy experience in relation to housing and other socio-economic rights. Leckie founded the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) and was its executive director between 1991 and 2007. He is the author of several books, including most recently Home: A Life in Pursuit of the Human Right to Adequate Housing for Everyone, Everywhere (Indies, 2026) and Housing, Land and Property Rights: Residential Justice, Conflict Zones and Climate Change (Routledge, 2024), and hundreds of articles and reports. Scott did his LLM at Essex in 1986-87.