Property, access, and social participation

This chapter revisits the regional case law on property and the myths of property to address the limits of addressing all claims of social participation with the right to property. Using as an example the rich catalogue of rights offered in the African Charter and how it has allowed the African Commission to address relationships to land beyond the property rhetoric, it assess how rights interact to accomplish needs for social participation through the material world. It moves on to illustrate the inadequacy of focusing on rules of property in the context of informal or extralegal land arrangements since it does not address the complex needs of people in this context. This chapter further suggests that social participation is best described as a claim of access, whether it be to social life, labour markets, legal and economic institutions, political forums, or cultural spaces. Such access depends on a person’s location and thus expresses itself differently depending on where these claims are made.