Formally acknowledging water as a human right could encourage the international community and governments to enhance their efforts to satisfy basic human needs and to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But critical questions arise in relation to a right to water. What would be the benefits and content of such a right? What mechanisms would be required for its effective implementation? Should the duty be placed on governments alone, or should the responsibility also be borne by private actors? Is another 'academic debate' on this subject warranted when action is really what is necessary? Without claiming to prescribe the answers, this publication clearly and carefully sets out the competing arguments and the challenges.

A comprehensive overview of the human rights to water and sanitation, exploring theoretical, conceptual, and practical aspects.

The United Nations General Assembly and the Human Rights Council recognised the human right to water in 2010. This formal recognition has put the issue high on the international agenda, but by itself leaves many questions unanswered. This book addresses this gap and clarifies the legal status and meaning of the right to water through a detailed analysis of its legal foundations, legal nature, normative content and corresponding State obligations. The human right to water has wide-ranging implications for the distribution of water. Examining these implications requires putting the right to water into the broader context of different water uses and analysing the linkages and competition with other human rights that depend on water for their realisation. Water allocation is a highly political issue reflecting societal power relations, with current priorities often benefitting the well-off and powerful. Human rights, in contrast, require prioritising the most basic needs of all people. The human right to water has the potential to address these underlying structural causes of the lack of access to water rooted in inequalities and poverty by empowering people to hold the State accountable to live up to its human rights obligations and to demand that their basic needs are met with priority.

The first book to engage in a comprehensive examination of the human right to water in theory and in practice.

Politicians and diplomats have for many years proclaimed a human right to water as a solution to the global water crisis, most recently in the 2010 UN General Assembly Resolution “The human right to water and sanitation”. To what extent, however, can a right to water legally and philosophically exist and what difference to international law and politics can it make? This question lies at the heart of this book. The book’s answer is to argue that a right to water exists under international law but in a more differentiated and multi-level manner than previously recognised. Rather than existing as a singular and comprehensive right, the right to water should be understood as a composite right of different layers, both deriving from separate rights to health, life and an adequate standard of living, and supported by an array of regional and national rights. The author also examines the right at a conceptual level. After disproving some of the theoretical objections to the category of socio-economic rights generally and the concept of a right to water more specifically, the manuscript develops an innovative approach towards the interplay of different rights to water among different legal orders. The book argues for an approach to human rights – including the right to water – as international minimum standards, using the right to water as a model case to demonstrate how multilevel human rights protection can function effectively. The book also addresses a crucial last question: how does one make an international right to water meaningful in practice? The manuscript identifies three crucial criteria in order to strengthen such a composite derived right in practice: independent monitoring; enforcement towards the private sector; and international realization. The author examines to what extent these criteria are currently adhered to, and suggests practical ways of how they could be better met in the future.​

... Based on presentations made at the International Conference on the Human Right to Water in Berlin, Germany, 21-22 October 2005.

This book summarizes the history of the human right to water, and it examines the main content and the obligations that derive from this human right. The main purpose of the recognition of the human right to water is to guarantee that everyone has access to sufficient, safe, and affordable drinking water to satisfy personal and domestic uses. The book discusses whether the human right to water is recognized as a derivative right or as an independent right at three levels - the universal, regional, and domestic levels - where human rights are recognized and enforced. At the domestic level a case study approach has been used with focus on Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Colombia. Freshwater resources are not static; they are constantly flowing and crossing international boundaries. This situation and the relative scarcity of water resources have a direct impact on a state's capacity to realize the human right to water. The human right to water is examined in a transboundary water context, where the use and management of an international watercourse in one riparian state can directly or indirectly affect the human right to water in another riparian state. For this reason, the book analyzes whether the core principles of international water law can be used to contribute to the realization of the extraterritorial application of the right to water. [Subject: Human Rights Law, International Law, Water Law, Comparative Law]