Legal Accountability for Human Rights Implementation through United Nations Treaty Bodies: Examining Human Rights Treaty Monitoring for Water and Sanitation

Given the pressing public health implications of water and sanitation, underlying a wide array of communicable and non-communicable health threats, global governance has looked to human rights as a means to address these pervasive harms. As human rights expand in scope and influence, water and sanitation—both instrumental to the realization of a wide range of human rights—have developed from an implicit to an explicit state obligation and come to be seen as an independent human right. Such efforts to develop international law have created a policy basis by which the implementation of human rights can structure water and sanitation systems to promote the public’s health, but for this right to take hold, there must be international monitoring mechanisms in place to ensure state accountability for realizing rights.

Examining the process of state reporting to human rights treaty bodies, this research assesses human rights treaty monitoring for water and sanitation, analyzing the evolution of water and sanitation reporting in state human rights reports. Through analytic legal coding of state human rights reports, such research is able to trace the evolution of state reporting on water and sanitation. Looking specifically to the practice of state reporting to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, this presentation examines how state reports correspond with evolving human rights norms, analyzes the influence of national factors on human rights implementation for health, and concludes with how reporting could be more conducive to accountability for the realization of human rights in water and sanitation.