Is Water a Human Right?

While human rights are widely recognized as basic fundamental rights regarding issues such as liberty, shelter, and health”, water is considered a complex and polarising issue within several important declarations, one being the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself. There have been several debates regarding this situation — many argue that its absence from significant declarations promotes its capitalization and commercialization, while others support that there are numerous challenges to recognizing water as a human right. Prompted by a global water scarcity scare emerging in the 1980s, many started emphasizing the idea of water as a necessity, especially one that fuels our daily survival, agricultural and industrial needs, which gradually developed into an internationally-acknowledged matter.

Eventually, when one questions if water should be identified as a human right, one must not view it in isolation. The perception of water as a fundamental human right affects one’s outlook on other aspects of humanity such as health, equality and education. Hence, one understands the significance of water as a potential human right only when viewed in relation to other basic human needs that its accessibility could influence.

The factors that cause water scarcity are primarily manmade because they are concerned with inadequately designed management and distribution systems. As…