“Once again, the UN Human Rights Council missed a critical opportunity to recognize the human right to water. Instead, as a result of lobbying by the United States and Canada, it passed a watered–down resolution protecting a corporation’s right to sell water”, said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of the US-based Food & Water Watch, in a statement released on 27 March 2008.
Canada’s resistance to recognising water as an international human right is based on the fear that it would lose sovereignty over its own water. “People could argue, ‘Well, you’ve agreed water is a human right, we here down in Atlanta have no water, there’s a drought,’ or in California or whatever. You have a moral obligation to be consistent with your word and let us take some water down here, by one means or another”, explained Canadian MP Francis Scarpaleggia in the Toronto Star.
The right to water was on the agenda at the 7th session of the Human Rights Council (Geneva, 3 - 28 March 2008). During the opening session on 3 March 2008, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxime Verhagen, announced that the Netherlands is to recognise the right to water as a human right.
“By far the major lightening rod of the resolution was the terminological description of the mandate, in the title of the resolution and elsewhere”, writes Claude Cahn, Head of Advocacy Unit, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE). “Any mention of a ‘right to water and sanitation’ was deleted, under the influence of withering objections by several governments that no such rights exist, and replaced with ‘Human Rights and access to safe drinking water and sanitation’ “. “The perceived need to adopt the resolution by consensus dictated that the adopted measure was significantly weaker than it might otherwise have been, particularly in the area of the normative description of the rights at issue”, Cahn added.
In the Resolution on Human Rights and Access to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation (A/HRC/7/L.16), the Council decided to “appoint, for a period of three years, an Independent Expert on the issue of human rights obligations related to access to safe drinking water and sanitation”. The expert’s task will be to undertake a study on best practices and human rights obligations related to water and sanitation, and submit a final report to the Council at its tenth session.
Read more: UN Human Rights Council, 28 Mar 2008
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UN Human Rights Council votes against water as a human right… « Water for the Ages // May 11, 2008 at 7:48 pm
[...] to satisfy the United States and Canada, the UN Human Rights Council deleted all phrases in the document stating “right to water and sanitation,” and replaced the [...]
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