Are property rights a human right?

The NZ Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation at Victoria University has published this paper on property rights as human rights.

They find that in the OECD, we are one of the very few countries that don’t have some sort of constitutional protection of our property rights. In fact only Australia and NZ do not.

I certainly support that at a minimum property rights should be included in the Bill of Rights Act 1990. Ideally I want to see a constitution one day where a number of basic rights are enshrined, and this would be one of them. The right is not absolute – sometimes property has to be taken to allow SH1 to be built for example – but there should always be fair compensation.