This chapter considers the interface of human rights and ‘urban law’,such as environmental nuisance and public order law. It revolves ar
This chapter considers the interface of human rights and ‘urban law’,such as environmental nuisance and public order law. It revolves around a set of cases concerning a community of some two-hundred Romanian Roma ‘EU migrant’ squatters in Malmö, Sweden, and builds on our first hand experiences as members of a street-law collective, the Centre for Social Rights (henceforth, the Centre).1Between 2015 and 2017, we par-ticipated in organising efforts to promote the interests and social rights of the Roma community in question. We also represented them in a number of legal cases against the City of Malmö and the local police authorities. In this chapter, we focus on our efforts to prevent the squatter community from being evicted from an unauthorised settlement – the Sorgenfri Camp – without a viable resettlement plan. We account for our experiences of attempting to mobilise a human and minority rights dis- course and invoke the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and discuss why this approach was eventually unsuccess- ful. This book chapter is an attempt to summarise our experience and analyse it with the benefit of hindsight as well as a greater theoretical understanding of the processes that we were a part of in 2015.