SQUAT is an innovative 24-month research project that analyses squatting, informal settlements and trespass in the light of European human rights frameworks. The project challenges traditional paradigms of property law by developing a comprehensive – legal, philosophical and computational – analysis of housing rights from the perspective of those on the margins of society. The research tackles the housing crisis in Europe by examining the tensions between the human right to housing and property rights. Although affordable housing is a fundamental European value, the commodification of housing units restricts access to it. Traditional legal doctrine remains trapped in a ‘legal title trap’, focusing on formal ownership whilst ignoring the housing practices of marginalised communities, including the homeless, politically motivated squatters, Roma, nomads and migrants, for whom squatting may represent the only form of possession available. The recent criminalisation of squatting across Europe makes this research urgent.

The project pursues three objectives: to reconstruct the concepts of squatting, homelessness, the right of possession and adverse possession using philosophical and data-driven methods; to develop a comparative analysis of squatting laws in the United Kingdom, Italy and Poland to assess their compatibility with European human rights standards; and to develop an ambitious normative theory that provides a moral and legal assessment of squatting.

SQUAT is at the forefront of integrating computational linguistics with normative legal theory through natural language processing (NLP), using Word2Vec to analyse how legal concepts evolve across different normative contexts, combining computational analysis of legal corpora with traditional research, and employing Queloz’s needs-based conceptual evaluation, which assesses concepts according to practical needs rather than abstract definitions. This represents the first application of word embedding techniques to concepts relating to property within the context of European human rights. The project goes beyond existing research by redefining squatting as a potential assertion of rights rather than a breach of the law.