The Legal Protection of Homeless Persons An Applied Study in Diyala Governorate

Abstract

Homelessness is one of the phenomena that has spread widely in many societies recently. Despite the progress of societies at various levels, it remains widespread. This phenomenon is universal from which all Western and developing societies suffer but with different ratios, conditions and legal treatments followed in each country and society.  This study aims to diagnose this phenomenon as one of the negative social phenomena in the societies by explaining its concept and showing the categories that fall within its description. In this study, the researcher assumes that there are many homeless cases in the country, neglect cases of official and informal institutions, absence of laws that regulate family and community life, and absence of legal and practical treatments to deal with this phenomenon. It is found that there are various effects of homelessness that differ in accordance with their causes whether legal, social, family, environmental, demographic or educational. The study proved the lack of adequate legal protection at the local level in Iraqi society that take on the responsibility of developing serious and effective treatments for this phenomenon as compared to the treatments taken at the international level.  The study ends to record the most important results reached at, which proved the existence of a clear legislative failure by the Iraqi legislator in addressing such a phenomenon, and the available treatments are for specific age groups. The position of the law towards homeless persons whose age is over eighteen has not been stated. The study points to the inability of the current institutions to fulfill their primary role for which they were established. This lead to widespread this phenomenon and to easily attract many of these groups to wrong behaviors and to recruit them to destroy society instead of working to contain them, treat them, and reintegrating them into the society as good individuals. Throughout the results of the study, the researcher reached to a set of recommendations to treat this phenomenon including the need to spread social awareness and defining the danger of this phenomenon, reducing and scaling it, developing urgent legislative treatments that go in line with the magnitude of the effects of this phenomenon, and impose deterrent penalties on the exploiters of these groups, with emphasis on activating the basic role of the existing institutions. It also recommends to develop a strategic plan to establish shelters to keep pace with their counterparts in the developed countries, the purpose of which is to shelter, educate and develop the skills, to prepare for the reintegration of these groups into the society.