QUESTION OF: HUMAN RIGHT TO WATER AND SANITATION
Background
Water is essential part of everyone’s life. Now we face such a serious problem as a water crisis. In fact a big amount of people from all over the world have no access to the safe-drinking water. Declaration of water as a basic right was already considered in 1966 but it was done only in 2002 by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. «The Committee adopted a General Comment on the right to health that provides a normative interpretation of the right to health as enshrined in Article 12 of the Covenant. This General Comment interprets the right to health as an inclusive right that extends not only to temporary and appropriate health care but also to those factors that determine good health» (1)
Statement of the problem
The gist of the situation is this: after almost 8-year declaring right to water as an independent and basic right there are still too much people suffering from lack of pure water. According to statistics the are 1 billion people that have no access to a safe-drinking water and more than 2 billion people who don’t have a system of water purification. «In 1998, 308 000 people died from war in Africa, but more than 2 million died of diarrheal disease» (1) which was caused by usage of pollute or dirty water.
The right to a water and sanitation is mentioned only in Convention on the Rights of the Child
The participants of historical conference (1977 Mar del Plata) declared that people from all over the globe have a right to sufficient quantity of water as a gratification of the basic needs.
Issues to consider
Bloc positions.
It is difficult to assign bloc positions to this topic because nations that might originally support each other are mired in their domestic issues.