Sweden versus social and economic human rights? Part 2: The right to water

by Rhodri C. Williams

In 2006, when I was still relatively new to this part of the world, I started participating in a working group run by Swedish Water House on water as a human right. At the time, only four years had passed since the UN Committee on Social and Economic Rights had read a right to water into the right to an adequate standard of living in their groundbreaking General Comment 15. The UNDP had just released its 2006 human development report on the global water crisis, which pinned blame firmly on misguided policies, not absolute scarcity or technical issues. DFID had just officially notified the world that water was a human right. The wind was at our backs. But not the Swedish Foreign Ministry.

In effect, what I had assumed would be an exercise in enlightened Swedes lecturing the world on the importance of recognizing the right to water turned out to be an exercise in enlightened Swedes lecturing official Sweden on this point. Neither the Foreign Ministry nor the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) had recognized the right to water, nor did they evince much enthusiasm. After a year of prodding, a pleasant but slightly beleaguered Foreign Ministry official attended an October 2007  seminar and conceded that “the government recognizes the right to water as emanating from the right to an adequate standard of living in article 11, paragraph 1 of the ICESCR” (seminar report, 12).

However, the lawyers had clearly been at work, and the “emanating” formulation (as opposed to recognition as a “free-standing right”) became a means of maintaining opposition to normative developments then underway in Geneva: