ABSTRACT
On July 26, 2010, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) formally recognized a human right to water and sanitation by adopting Resolution 64/292, which states that water and sanitation are “essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights” (UNGA 2010, 2). The resolution relied on the definition of a right to water and sanitation in General Comment 15, adopted by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) in 2002: “The human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses. . . . These uses ordinarily include drinking, personal sanitation, washing of clothes, food preparation, personal and household hygiene” (ECOSOC 2002, paras. 2, 12(a)). The right has since been affirmed by the UN Human Rights Council in Resolution A/HRC/15/L.14, which declared that “the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation is derived from the right to an adequate standard of living and inextricably related to the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, as well as the right to life and human dignity” (UNHRC 2010, 2). Thus the human right to water is contained within existing human rights treaties and is legally binding on the states that are party to those treaties.
