III. >> M  ethodological Approaches to Human Rights Indicators >> Sources and data-generating mechanisms Box 17 Using survey indicators to claim rights – civil society initiative of Seven Towers residents, north Belfast, United Kingdom The story of the residents of the Seven Towers in North Belfast shows how rights holders can use indicators to claim their rights. With the assistance of a civil society organization, Participation and the Practice of Rights Project (PPR), the residents of the Seven Towers, which is a high-rise social housing complex in Northern Ireland, linked their recurrent and serious housing problems to a set of core indicators related to international human rights standards. Six indicators and their corresponding benchmarks were used to monitor the performance of government institutions in delivering residents’ housing entitlements over several time periods. The six “right to adequate housing” indicators on which the residents collected information, using a representative door-to-door survey, were: Percentage of landings cleaned of pigeon waste; Number of families with children living in the Seven Towers; Percentage of residents reporting drainage and sewage problems; Percentage of residents reporting dampness and mould in their flats; Percentage of residents happy with the response they received from the housing executive to their reported problems (perception and opinion survey); and P ercentage of residents dissatisfied with how involved they felt in decisions by the housing executive (perception and opinion survey). The first indicator refers to general comment No. 4 (1991) on the right to adequate housing of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: “adequate housing must be habitable, in terms of providing the inhabitants with adequate space and protecting them from cold, damp, heat, rain, wind or other threats to health, structural hazards, and disease vectors” (para. 8 (d)). The second indicator refers to article 27 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child: “States parties recognize the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.” Though the “parent(s) or others responsible for the child have the primary responsibility to secure, within their abilities and financial capacities, the conditions of living necessary for the child’s development”, there are aspects that are mainly in the domain of the community or the local authorities and have to be addressed at that level. A monitoring body set up by the residents tracked progress and also submitted progress reports on benchmarks to the relevant government institutions. The monitoring process using indicators and benchmarks, coupled with media attention and information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, helped the residents achieve small, yet important improvements in their housing conditions. The government institutions also acknowledged that the residents’ active participation assisted them in administrating resources efficiently. Sources: D. Donnelly, F. McMillan and N. Browne, “Active, free and meaningful: resident participation and realising the right to adequate housing in north Belfast”, 2009. Available from www.york.ac.uk/chp/hsa/papers/spring09/Donnelly.pdf (accessed 23 May 2012). Participation and the Practice of Rights Project (www.pprproject.org). Human Rights Indicators 61