ABSTRACT
Human settlements, whether rural villages, small towns, or megacities, all face the same challenge of providing adequate supplies of water for their residents. When this basic function cannot be met, through drought or political breakdown, those communities literally fade into the dust of time. The Moghul capital city of Fatehpur Sikri in India, for example, was abandoned shortly after its elaborate construction, when it became clear that the local water sources would be insufficient to support the population (Revi 2008). Most other cities that have succumbed to water shortages, however, have done so more gradually and anonymously, waiting patiently to reveal their stories to future archaeologists. Water supply, in other words, is not to be taken lightly. It can mean the
difference between life and death both for individuals and their communities. This self-evident priority for water supply is the reason that the human right to drinking water has long been honored by cultural customs and national laws. In 2010 the right to water was incorporated as a UNrecognized human right, and not only the right to water, but also the right to sanitation (see Box 4.1). While the importance of a right to water has been intuitively obvious since the dawn of humanity, the concept of sanitation as a human right developed as a result of recent advances in medical understanding about water-borne diseases. Just as withholding water from someone dying of thirst is tantamount to murder, offering water contaminated with the cholera virus, or dysentery-inducing bacteria, or debilitating larger organisms such as Guinea worm, is also a type of murder. Of course no one goes around offering water that is known to be con-
taminated. That would be criminal. But something very close to this was considered ethically acceptable prior to the 2010 UN resolution: Letting people fend for themselves to find water that is safe to drink. And since the biggest cause of life-threatening water-borne disease is human feces, the provision of safe water depends very much on effective sanitation. The pertinent language of the UN Resolution is the following, the General Assembly “Declares the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights; [and] Calls upon States and international organizations to provide
financial resources, capacity-building and technology transfer, through international assistance and cooperation, in particular to developing countries, in order to scale up efforts to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all …” (United Nations General Assembly 2010). From an ethics perspective, the UN recognition of “access to safe water
and sanitation” as a human right has significance for two reasons. First, it shows that ethics can and do change. Not only did the resolution formalize the prevailing view that since everyone needs water to survive, that it is effectively a human right already, but it expanded the category to include sanitation. Second, the UN Resolution underscores the linkages between safe water and human well-being in the form of social equity (everyone has the same right) and health. The goal of safe water and sanitation has the purpose not only of survival, but also better health and “the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.”
