Three measures to ensure clean water for all Latin Americans

About six years ago, the UN formally included access to safe water and sanitation on the Human Rights list, a recognition that has helped improve coverage of water services for the population, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Uruguay, Argentina and Costa Rica are the countries in the region with the highest level of equality in access to water and sanitation services between rural and urban areas. One common feature among these three countries is that they have recognized the human right to water and sanitation in their national legislation, developing programs and plans aimed at ensuring the exercise of this right.

In general, however, the region should increase and improve planning of its efforts to achieve that goal, by adopting a more comprehensive approach to this right and its implications. In order to provide strategic support to countries, CAF prepared the report “Implementation of the human right to water in Latin America,” which identifies three priorities to be addressed:

• Formally recognizing the human right to water and sanitation. This is the starting point for adopting a legal approach when dealing with water planning and management processes, as well as in case of legal disputes. One indicator that would allow us to measure progress in this area is the number of constitutional and legal frameworks that recognize the human right to water and sanitation, including its various components.
• Guaranteeing the full exercise of this right, which not only includes providing clean water and sewer systems to the population. It also implies issues related to the quality of services, affordability, accountability, citizen participation, acceptability, as well as environmental and financial sustainability of systems, which are generally not taken into consideration in development indicators of the countries of the region. To assess progress in this regard, we propose to quantify the number of national strategies, policies, plans and programs that explicitly adopt a human rights approach that considers all issues mentioned above.
• Establishing the necessary legal remedies, so that communities and users, or even the state, can enforce these rights in the event of violations by operators or other stakeholders. In this regard, we propose to analyze the number of court rulings that take into consideration access to water and sanitation as a human right, as well as the number of authorities, service operators and agencies that are knowledgeable about the implications and content of this right.

According to the publication, access to quality water and sanitation services is necessary to contribute to the well-being and productive development of Latin Americans. Therefore, each country must ensure full compliance with all the issues that this human right entails, extending its scope to all citizens in an inclusive and transparent manner.