More than one billion people inhabiting the planet, one-sixth of the world's population lack daily access to the vital element: water. In Latin America, more than 75 million people go through this situation. More than 2 billion men, women and children around the world (116 millions of Latin Americans) also lack adequate drainage and sanitation.
On November 2002, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the United Nations declared the access of water to be a (international) human right. Nevertheless, today we can still witness the existence of a big gap between this declaration and its actual enforcement by the (sovereign) states, especially in undeveloped countries.
• How can this gap be bridged?
• How can states formulate the adequate public policies and regulations that could lead to the adequate enforcement of this human right?
• How do local communities work towards sustainability of water and environment?
• What is the role played by international organizations in this issue, especially UN?
• Access to water should be always regulated by the state? (Since the challenge of supplying vast populations with this resource is almost unreachable for poor nations that lack the adequate infrastructure and financing).
• What difference can it really make the declaration of access to water to be an international human right?
Preliminary bibliography:
• Shaw, Malcolm, “International Law”, Fifth Edition, University of Cambridge, 2003.
• The World Bank, “The Human Right to Water. Legal and Policy Dimensions”, Washington, 2004.
• Steiner, Henry; Alston, Philip; Goodman, Ryan, “International human rights in context: law, politics, morals”, Third Edition, Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Pogge, Thomas, “World Poverty and Human Rights”, Second Edition, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008.
• Gleick, Peter (compiler), “The world's water, 2004-2005: the biennial report on freshwater resource”, The Center for Resource Economics, Washington, 2004.
• Cassar, Ángela; Nemes, Noemí, “Water as a Human Right?”, International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources – UNDP, Cambridge, 2006.
This is a great start, though you will have to coordinate closely with Joshua since his paper is touching on some of the same issues. One possible avenue is to look at how other rights moved from being recognized in UN declarations, to becoming customary international law and/or treaty law, to being applied by states internally or enforced externally by others (through moral, economic or even military pressure). If you did this, you'd also have to consider whether the right to water is qualitatively different from some of those other rights (say torture, for instance) and whether it is realistic to hope for the same kind of progressive legal development here.
It also occurs to me that, rather than focusing on the right to water generally, you might look specifically at the right to keep water a public good. This may be easier to enforce than the more general right, and therefore more realistically achieved.
In any event, good work!
Posted by: Michael Byers | 10/06/2010 at 08:24 AM