|
Current Issue | Past Issues | About
the Report
UN Committee Declares Water a Human Right
“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.
| 
