Monitoring the Progressive Realization of the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation: Frontier Analysis as a Basis to Enhance Human Rights Accountability (original) (raw)
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Flowing from the evolution of international legal obligations for water and sanitation, human rights practice has shifted to address state accountability for a human right to water and sanitation through the development of human rights indicators. This policy note focuses on efforts to develop indicators for state reporting to human rights treaty bodies, with human rights norms framing national reports and treaty bodies employing indicators to monitor the progressive realization of the human right to water and sanitation. In supporting evidence-based treaty monitoring through the United Nations (UN), both the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation have sought to develop indicators. This process of developing indicators for the human right to water and sanitation seeks to draw on previous indicator development practices, looking to these practices in framing, identifying and reviewing indicators. As part of a larger drive to facilitate rights-based accountability, there arises an imperative to study the political process of developing indicators, looking to past models in structuring future processes to assess the realization of the right to water and sanitation. Exploring the development of indicators for the human rights to health and education, this policy note analyses the indicator development process, proposing an indicator development process model as a basis for developing indicators that reflect the attributes of the right to water and sanitation, enlist key stakeholders in the policymaking process and have political relevance for state reporting to treaty bodies.
Reporting progress on the human right to water and sanitation through JMP and GLAAS
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International institutions have the authority to monitor States' compliance with the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRWS) but the necessary tools for this task are not yet ready. The human development sector has a wider experience of using information about progress, which provides a perfect opportunity to develop this further. The World Health Organization (WHO)/United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Joint Monitoring programme (JMP) and the UN Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS) data sets could be used for those with a mandate to monitor the right, contributing to this challenge. Consequently, the information they offer has been analysed through a human rights lens. A matrix has been constructed to specifically identify to what extent their data sets could be combined to monitor HRWS in a broad sense. The JMP-led post-2015 proposal makes a considerable contribution to outcome indicators for measuring right-holders’ enjoyment ...
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Ten years after the United Nation’s recognition of the human right to water and sanitation (HRtWS), little is understood about how these right impacts access to sanitation. There is limited identification of the mechanisms responsible for improvements in sanitation, including the international and constitutional recognition of rights to sanitation and water. We examine a core reason for the lack of progress in this field: data quality. Examining data availability and quality on measures of access to sanitation, we arrive at three findings: (1) where data are widely available, measures are not in line with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets, revealing little about changes in sanitation access; (2) data concerning safe sanitation are missing in more country-year observations than not; and (3) data are missing in the largest proportions from the poorest states and those most in need of progress on sanitation. Nonetheless, we present two regression analyses to determine what...
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With water and sanitation vital to the public's health, there have been growing calls to accept water and sanitation as a human right and establish a rights-based framework for water policy. Through the development of international law, policymakers have increasingly specified water and sanitation as independent human rights. In this political development of human rights for water and sanitation, the authors find that the evolution of rights-based water and sanitation policy reached a milestone in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly's 2010 Resolution on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation. By memorializing international political recognition of these interconnected rights and the corresponding obligations of national governments, states provided a normative framework for expanded efforts to realize human rights through water and sanitation policy. Examining the opportunities created by this UN Resolution, this article analyzes the implementation of the human right to water and sanitation through global water governance, national water policy and water and sanitation outcomes. While obstacles remain in the implementation of this right, the authors conclude that the UN Resolution could have lasting benefits for public health. means of realizing improved public health through rights-based water and sanitation policy. In examining the development of human rights to address the public health implications of water and sanitation, this article describes the role of human rights as a normative framework for public policy, assesses the evolution of a human right to water under international law and describes the 2010 UN Resolution that now shapes a distinct human right to water and sanitation. From the seminal role of the UN Resolution, the authors analyze the prospects for implementation of this Resolution through global water governance, national water policy, and water and sanitation outcomes. Recognizing that obstacles remain at each step of implementation, the authors outline research needed to examine the process by which human rights impact water and sanitation. With increased human rights specificity facilitating human rights accountability, this article concludes that there are now enhanced opportunities for rights-based water and sanitation policy, but that additional research will be necessary to overcome obstacles in translating human rights into improvements in the public's health.
The declaration of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation by the UN General Assembly in 2010 is a significant achievement. Successfully implementing, enforcing and monitoring this right in various countries, contexts and scales will be an even greater achievement. Facilitating accountability for water and sanitation as a human right, The Water Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights hosted a workshop to examine the translation of public health data into human rights indicators. Experts in water and sanitation policy and human rights law discussed and debated the challenges and ways forward in developing indicators for equity and non-discrimination that would assist with meaningful practice of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation.
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Human rights to water and sanitation have been widely recognised in legal instruments at the international, regional, and national levels of governance. More awareness of states’ obligations has provided additional impetus to promote human rights in policy advocacy. The international non-governmental organisation WaterAid, as a non-state actor specialising in the water, sanitation, and hygiene services (WASH) sector, adopts a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to WASH programming. This paper draws on the experiences from WaterAid WASH projects in four countries – Nepal, Ghana, Mali, and Burkina Faso, to evaluate the practical impacts of the HRBA to ensure that governments fulfil their responsibility to realise universal access to water and sanitation services in different contexts. The outcomes highlight that three important contributions of the HRBA: (1) generates greater awareness among rightsholders and duty bearers about responsibilities and entitlements over safe drinking water...
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Since 2010, the United Nations General Assembly had explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and obliged States to provide for its progressive realization and entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for essential personal and domestic uses. This paper scrutinizes the legal basis and the policy implication for human right to water in Indonesia, before and following the annulment of the Water Resource Law 7/2004. This paper considers that one of the greatest challenges is to find an appropriate and internationally-comparable methodology in measuring the progressive realization of human rights to water and sanitation. We also highlight the importance of composite indicators and concludes that single variable indicators are insufficient to capture the range of issues involved in the realization of the human rights to water.
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Government monitoring of water and sanitation services is a critical step in realising the human rights to water and sanitation (HRWS). In this study we investigated the national water and sanitation policies of 13 Pacific island countries (PICs) to understand how they envision monitoring the water and sanitation service delivery dimensions put forth by the HRWS framework. In particular, we analysed the policies for fundamental aspects of good monitoring governance and sought to learn how strongly monitoring of each service delivery dimension was represented in the policies. We found that delineation of roles and responsibilities and defined information flows are generally underdeveloped, and that the policies tend to give precedence to monitoring the service delivery dimensions of availability, quality, and sustainability over accessibility, affordability, acceptability, and equality. Donors have considerable influence on which dimensions receive the most emphasis in the policies. ...