I wasn't limiting myself to land only though, but you are right that that is a more elusive right to property owing to various problems with giving absolute right to land. After all, imagine if I bought property right in a narrow passageway in the Rocky Mountains and then decided to build a road on it and charge a fortune for anyone using it. Obviously not too fair seeing that I'm essentially monopolizig on a passage and a key transporation route.
However, there should still be some right to property granted in general. For example, if your roommate is charged with a crime, does the government have the right to confiscate your computer without good reason and compensation?
I remember one case like that. As it turned out, my colleagues... someone other (I can't remember the details whether it was roommate, roommate's brother, or someone else) was charged with the possesssion of child pornography. Since she lived with him, and the police believed that, with or without her knowledge he may have had access to her computer and may have downloaded pornographic images into it, the police therefore confiscated it.
She needed use of her computer plus access to many documents in that computer. First off, the police would not provide her with an alternative computer in the meantime, nor would it even allow her to copy the contents of her computer onto a disk so as to be able to transfer it to anotehr computer to keep working on it, even if under police supervision, or even if the police should do so for her.
As a result, she'd gone a few months without access to her computer nor the documents on it, thus holding her back from working on some of those documents and having to borrow a computer from a friend. She did get it back after a year, but with no compensation for the inconvenience it caused her
I have much valuable information om my notebook computer too, and I work on it most days. I'd be mightily ticked off if the police should confiscate my computer without reasonable compensation. I could certainly understand that they may need it for a criminal investigation. But at the very least, they could lend me a similar computer for personal use in the meantime until I get mine back, just as they could also, under strict supervision of course, allow me to download information from the confiscated computer into the new temporary one, or at least have someone else do so under my supersition, or something of the cort, simply to not disrupt my work owing to this loss of my property. This unfortunately is what happened to by colleague because she was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Something in the Constitution similar to Article 17 of the UDHR would not prevent the police from having confiscated her computer necessarily, since that confiscation was not arbitrary. However, she could have argued for reasonable compensation, not necessarily financial, but material none-the-less such as the provision of a similar computer for use in the meantime and allowance to access to the information on the old computer before it be taken in for investigation, etc.
Also, right to own property and right to use property are not the same either. Certainly the government is well within its rights to regulate the use of property while still protecting one's right to own it.
Property rights and the Constitution (BP-268E)
It's interesting to note that the reason for the so watered-down version above was opposition from certain provinces. And it still did not pass, even in this watered-down version.
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