the human right to water and sanitation in emergency situations

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13.4. opportunities offered by a rights-based approach to advocacy
Recognition of the right to water as a human right makes it possible to develop an approach that is based
on identifying violations of this right coupled with working to remedy them. However, violations of the right
to water are not as immediately obvious as the more traditional abuses of human rights, such as torture
and suppression of free speech. Indeed, with economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to
water and sanitation, the tendency has been to concentrate more on monitoring their progressive realization
than on identifying and exposing specific violations. However, the position has evolved in recent years.
A rights-based advocacy approach to water issues is effective precisely because it invokes the language
of legal rights and legally-binding state obligations, and violations, all of which are concerned with the
relationship between individuals and the community as rights-holders and the state, or other responsible
authorities, as duty-bearers. The very fact that governments are accountable for complying with concrete
obligations means that the identification of violations that correspond to those obligations plays a vital part
in working with a human rights based approach to water issues. Taking steps to observe and monitor
whether violations are taking place helps humanitarian agencies to focus their work on potential problem
areas and to assess the extent to which the government in question is taking seriously, as a matter of priority,
the fulfilment of its duties to implement the right to water. For this reason, the identification of common
violations is helpful in directing monitoring. The immediate identification and official recognition of specific
violations serves a number of important purposes. It draws attention to urgent problem areas, focuses and
defines the work of NGOs, and helps target the latter’s monitoring activities. Furthermore, a focus on violations
emphasizes both government responsibility and accountability. When it is described in the language
of rights and violations, a lack of access to clean water that has been dismissed by the government as a
regrettable and inevitable social problem becomes a government failure to meet its human rights obligations
and, as such, has much more weight.
However, the reasons for NGOs identifying violations of the right to water should not necessarily be seen
as confrontational, i.e. to name and shame governments, as the issue could, in this case, become a sensitive
one. On the contrary, NGOs adopting a human rights approach to water have an important role to
play, both as the partners of governments, by constructively contributing to the promotion and progressive
implementation of the right to water, and as the watchdogs of governments, by monitoring their performance.
As such, they should exert pressure from the bottom up by identifying violations at individual and
at community levels and by educating people about and informing them of their water-related rights. At
the same time, they should assist governments in meeting their obligations in a sustainable manner. The
position adopted by a humanitarian agency will depend upon its specific mandate.
In practice, this means that advocacy that identifies and denounces violations (or abuses, or neglect) of
the right to water and sanitation, may take different approaches depending upon the level of violation and
the particular context:
- In the most serious situations that cause immediate harm to the civilian population, the use of language
denouncing a violation of the right to water and attributing that violation to a specific named actor may
be the most appropriate means to end or obtain a change in circumstances. This may be the case,
for example, where there is evidence that government armed forces or armed opposition groups are
deliberately targeting water resources with a view to rendering them unusable by civilians.
- In cases where access to water and sanitation is effectively denied to the population, but not neces-
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