From an implicit responsibility to an explicit obligation : examining the human right to water under international law

Abstract

Water is literally life. Without it, there would be no life on Earth. For this reason, access to a safe and adequate supply of water is essential for human survival. Despite this fact, however, a significant portion of the world’s population still lack access to a safe and adequate supply of water and sanitation. This is concerning because lack of a safe and adequate supply of water and sanitation often leads to a wide spread of water-related diseases such as diarrhea, cholera and typhoid, all of which annually claim the lives of thousands of people around the world. To make matters worse, despite the efforts made by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) to address this issue by recognising the human right to water as a human right in its General Comment 15 of 2002 - the issuance of which subsequently led to further recognition of the human right to water by both the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in 2010 - the recognition and the legal status of the human right to water under international law continue to be the subjects of controversy. This has resulted in uncertainty regarding the legal status, bases, normative content and the scope of the human right to water as well as the obligations arising from this right under international law. Against this background, this study sought to examine the human right to water under international law with the aim of clarifying its legal status, bases, normative content and scope as well as the correlative states’ obligations emanating from it under international. To this end, this study has demonstrated that the human right to water enjoys a dual and fragmented recognition under international law and as a result the human right to water equally enjoys a fragmented and dual but contradictory legal status under international law, which has the risk of leading to an inconsistent and ineffective implementation of the right in practice. For this reason, this study concluded that until the human right to water is codified and recognised as an explicit and an independent right under international, the current uncertainty surrounding its legal status, normative content, scope and the correlative states’ obligations emanating from it under international law will remain and as such the human right to water under international law will always be at the risk of being recognised as a mere derivative right and not as an independent right.