In November 2002 the United Nations launched the General Comment No. 15 on the implementation of Articles 11 and 12 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The General Comment defines that access to clean drinking water is a human right. However, the General Comment is not legally binding on the states that have ratified the International Covenant. Accordingly, the associated principles provided by the document are often neglected in projects of international organizations, such as the World Bank which still treats water as a purely economic good. This was one key message of Kim Weidenberg's lecture "The Human Right to Water and its implementation in the World Bank: The case of the Aquifer Guarani". The event has been organized by the Initiative for Sustainable Development on 15 January at Berlin's Humboldt University.



The Aquifer Guarani is one of the world's largest underground water reserves and the economic interests in its exploration now and in its future are huge. The aquifer lies under Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. It is particularly threatened by Brazil's large soya and sugar cane plantations and by lacking environmental legislation. So far, Uruguay is the only country of the four that has declared the right to water as a human right and enacted water as a public good in its constitution. The World Bank instead wants the liberal environmental law of Brazil to be the legal foundation for the management of the aquifer. In May 2003, the "Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development of the Guarani Aquifer System Project" was launched. The 28 million US dollar project is funded partly by the involved countries; the other half is contributed by the World Bank.



Kim Weidenberg underscored the great importance and uniqueness of the project for the management of transboundary ground water resources, which could provide a blueprint for many other projects worldwide. Against this background it is particularly problematic that integrated water management, information exchange and collaboration between the regional levels as well as between all concerned (local) interest groups are hardly included. Additionally, mechanisms for conflict prevention, as have been demanded by Paraguay and Uruguay, have not been integrated into the project. Instead, the World Bank concentrates on "exert management", scientific and technical approaches and on risk reduction for private investment in order to privatize the water sector. In the discussion there was agreement that this bears the danger that once more only large companies will profit, while the local population is deprived of any decisions concerning the distribution of the waters – undermining an essential prerequisite for the implementation of the human right for water. (Christiane Röttger)



More information on the right to water, including the General Comment No. 15 is available at

http://www.menschenrechtwasser.de/menschenrecht-wasser/492_ENG_HTML.php

and at http://www.fian.org/programs-and-campaigns/right-to-water



For further information on the World Bank project, please see

http://www.iwlearn.net/iw-projects/Fsp_112799467571/

Published in: ECC-Newsletter, February 2008