who continuously prey on and victimize the former by sowing disinformation, collecting fees and inflicting harassment’.17 These mechanisms were buttressed by additional institutional drives to ‘suppress and eradicate’ professional squatting and squatting syndicates to ensure that ‘only the legitimate homeless and underprivileged are the beneficiaries of the government housing programs’, and the establishment of a special task force to pursue the apprehension and prosecution of professional squatters and squatting syndicates.18 The noticeably emotive language used in the context of ‘professional squatting’, coupled with the fortification of criminal and administrative sanctions against individuals and groups deemed to belong to that category of persons, is indicative of a trend in Philippine government policy to encourage punitive measures against many of those who do not comply with the requirements of housing regulation, and perhaps a broader hostility and sense of frustration towards the inefficiency of government housing programmes. The employment of the category of ‘professional squatters’ is problematic in terms of compliance with international human rights law, as will be explained in Chapter 5. Submissions were also considered from the CHR and various NGOs and civil society coalitions. Most notably the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) provided written comments19 to the Committee to refute many of the claims made by the Government in its State report. Drawing particular attention to the Government’s assertion that it had identified a host of proclaimed sites to be used for public housing, COHRE alleged that the Government had only gone so far as to ‘proclaim’ most of these sites without undertaking, or planning to undertake, other requirements necessary to actually dispose of this land to informal settlers, such as promulgating implementing rules and regulations for the sites and their use, selecting appropriate beneficiaries for the sites and allocating the resources necessary to facilitate disposal of the land. 20 COHRE also highlighted the lack of affordability of many of the Government’s housing subsidy programmes due to the requirement of onerous amortization payments in excess of PHP1000 per month.21 Moreover, concern was raised that individuals with special interests and vulnerable groups, including ‘ethnic and religious minorities and indigenous people, the elderly, children, physically disabled, the terminally ill, HIV-positive individuals, persons with persistent medical problems, the mentally ill, victims of natural disasters, people living in disaster prone areas and other groups’ were not sufficiently accounted for in the development of housing policy and related programmes.22 Finally, COHRE reported that in the period between 1995 and 2008 over 1.2 million people had been forcibly evicted from their homes, the majority of which were as a result of large-scale development projects. It was reported that most of these large-scale evictions were carried out by the 17 Ibid, paras. 609-610. Ibid, paras. 612-613. 19 Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, Written Comments Concerning Philippines for Consideration by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 2008. 20 Ibid, p. 3. 21 Ibid, p. 4. 22 Ibid, p. 5. 18 24  Human Rights in the Rubble