HOUSING RIGHTS In addition, the Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples continues to be preoccupied with land issues, as shown in his 2004 report to the CHR concerning the Inughuit people in Greenland. Their land was seized in 1953 to make way for a US air force base.32 and the anxieties of the Sami people in Finland regarding the impact of a proposed land-management bill on their traditional rights to land and resources was also evidenced.33 The ECHR can hand down binding judgments offering the prospect of real redress for victims. While its case law on discrimination against minorities remains generally underdeveloped,34 its creative interpretation of traditional civil rights provisions has allowed some limited economic and social rights protection, particularly in the case of housing and land rights. The procedure has recently been streamlined, but applicants must still surmount a number of hurdles before their claims are considered admissible, including the need to exhaust domestic remedies and to ensure that the claim is not ‘manifestly ill-founded’.35 Quasi-legal mechanisms, such as those of the World Bank Inspection Panel, may have more accessible procedures but often lack the independence of a court of law and the ability to provide effective remedies for victims. However, their decisions will usually carry great moral weight and can be used to great effect to campaign both domestically and internationally for changes in the policy and the law. Litigation should always be seen not just as an end in itself, but as part of a broader advocacy strategy. Guidelines for successful advocacy The success of human rights advocacy – whether focused on litigation or part of a broader strategy that encompasses media work and lobbying – will frequently be the story of partnerships: working to gather information on the ground and present it to the wider community. As both case studies below demonstrate, partnerships can take a variety of forms and involve a range of actors. In the case of the Kurds bringing cases before the European Court of Human Rights, it involved an international organization acting as an intermediary between the victims and grassroots lawyers and activists and legal experts based at a university Human Rights Centre. Everybody had a vital role to play: the grassroots lawyers working with the victims on the ground to gather evidence, the international NGO assembling the case-file and briefing the legal experts who, in turn, argued the case before the Court. The interaction also provided important lessons on the need to be rigorous in the collecting of corroborative evidence in order, not just to prove that the alleged violations took place, but that they were part of a much wider pattern of abuse. Successful advocacy can also be a matter of seizing opportunities and using them to your advantage. In the case 33