Under international law, ‘forced eviction’ is defined as: ‘the permanent or  temporary removal against their will of individuals, families and/or communities from the homes and/or land which they occupy, without the provision of, and access to,appropriate form of legal or other protection.

The prohibition on forced evictions does not, however, apply to evictions carried out by force in accordance with the law and in conformity with the provisions of the International Covenants on Human Rights (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights).

The acceptance of a continuum of land rights is an important step to improve the position of the poor and other vulnerable groups in relation to access to land and tenure security. To have full impact, however, this continuum has to be supplemented by a pro-poor land recordation system.

This paper supplies the first steps to come to the design of such a pro-poor land recordation system. It takes lessons from the history of developing land recordation systems in the Western world and their introduction to other territories. It identifies a number of elements that the design needs to meet, and comes with the first ideas for the design itself. An important one relates to the use of the community leadership to identify the parties, their position and status in the community, as well as the tenure arrangements and evidentiary rules in practice there. Instead of using paper trails and expert knowledge of professionals, the community and its leadership will provide these. To make sure that the system is not only affecting the local reality, it needs to have buy-in from the public sector actors as well. This is done via ‘co-management’, in which the public sector actors and the community share responsibilities for the recordation system. The linking-pins between the two are the (barefoot) land officer and the local record keeper. The paper does not detail the institutional and political economy side of the design, which will be the focus of proposed future work.

The proposed system is a trimmed down approach to land recordation, and has to be seen as the first step on a continuum of land recording. It allows people, especially the poor in customary areas and informal settlements, to set the first step on the property ladder, and should be flexible enough to allow for future improvements.