AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

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Report on Science and Human Rights

Winter 2003 Vol XXIII, No. 1

“Water is a limited natural resource and a public good fundamental for life and health. The human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.”

With these words, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR or the Committee) took the historic step of declaring a human right to water for personal and household use in General Comment No. 15 on the Right to Water, which it adopted in November 2002. A General Comment is a document that provides interpretive guidance to assist States parties in meeting and reporting on their obligations under the Covenant.

One of the premises of human rights is that every human being has a right to those things that are essential to human life. Among those fundamentals are clean air, food, safe water, housing and clothing. However, air and water are not mentioned in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR or the Covenant). At the time the International Covenant was drafted, in the 1950s, clean air and water were so abundant that it may not have occurred to the drafters that they needed to write them explicitly into the Covenant.

Fresh water is no longer abundant, and there is widespread awareness of issues of water quantity, quality and distribution. More than one billion people in the world do not have access to a basic water supply and an estimated 2.4 billion lack access to adequate sanitation. Unless effective action is taken, these trends will continue and further exacerbate a precarious situation. Water was a major theme at the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, and the United Nations has declared 2003 the International Year of Freshwater. In March 2003, a major international conference—the Third World Water Forum—will take place in Kyoto, Japan.

Because ther right to water does not appear in the Covenant per se, the Committee derived the right from its interpretation of other provisions, locating it in Articles 11 (the right to an adequate standard of living) and 12 (the right to health). The General Comment deals with adequate water for personal and domestic purposes, defining adequacy in terms of factors such as availability, accessibility, quality and quantity.
In simplified terms, a human right imposes legal obligations on states to respect, protect, and fulfill the normative content of the right, and to do so in a way that reflects the fundamental human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination. States must give special attention to the needs of marginalized and vulnerable people. In economic, social and cultural rights, every human being has a claim on the state to meet it’s minimum core obligation with respect to that right, through direct provision if other means are not available. Human rights also provide forms of recourse and redress if a state violates its obligations.

The international human rights system has weaknesses, notably in its lack of effective enforcement mechanisms. Still, the existence of human rights gives people legal claims, and as they press their claims and come to believe in their rights, they begin to make the rights real.

Participation of AAAS and Other NGOs

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has traditionally been receptive to participation in its work by non-governmental organizations. As in other parts of the UN system, the resources of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights are scarce, and the involvement of NGOs has been very useful to the Committee in leveraging these scarce resources.

The Committee had the assistance of academic, UN, NGO and other experts in drafting and reviewing the General Comment on water. The Science and Human Rights Program and in particular its Director, Audrey Chapman, have a longstanding relationship with the Committee and have worked with it on similar initiatives.

The Committee sent SHR a draft of General Comment No. 15 in October 2002, with a request to review it and provide feedback. Believing that the combined input of environmental, human rights and community development NGOs would be most useful in providing recommendations on a topic like water that touches all these areas, SHR organized an informal consultation of about a dozen NGOs to discuss the draft and make recommendations. The consultation took place on October 30. SHR collected and synthesized the recommendations in a document that was sent to the drafters in November. Audrey Chapman attended the CESCR’s session in November, participated in a general discussion and assisted with the final drafting of the General Comment. Input from the NGO consultation organized by SHR is reflected in the final document in a variety of ways, including the emphasis on sanitation and on community participation in decision-making.

Awareness is growing in the human rights and environmental communities of the extent of their common ground. Human rights like health and food cannot meaningfully be understood without taking account of their environmental dimensions, and human rights mechanisms can be invoked to protect the environment. Formal acknowledgment that adequate and accessible water of acceptable quality for personal and domestic use is a human right is a major step forward in strengthening these connections and ensuring that all people have access to the water they need for their survival.