Return To: 2023 Handbook

2023 Handbook

VIRTUAL SIMULATION: Human Rights Council

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The Human Rights Council (HRC) serves two primary functions: it sets human rights standards and it attempts to bring non-compliant countries into compliance through persuasion, capacity building and—if necessary—highlighting human rights abuses on the world stage. The Council also deploys Special Rapporteurs to monitor human rights and study topics of interest. While the Security Council, General Assembly and HRC often address similar issues, the HRC is limited to addressing the human rights aspect of the problem, not broader security and development issues.

Members Members

  • Algeria
  • Argentina
  • Bangladesh
  • Belgium
  • Benin
  • Bolivia
  • Cameroon
  • Chile
  • China
  • Costa Rica
  • Côte d’Ivoire
  • Cuba
  • Czechia
  • Eritrea
  • Finland
  • France
  • Gabon
  • Gambia
  • Georgia
  • Germany
  • Honduras
  • India
  • Kazakhstan
  • Kyrgyzstan
  • Lithuania
  • Luxembourg
  • Malawi
  • Malaysia
  • Maldives
  • Mexico
  • Montenegro
  • Morocco
  • Nepal
  • Pakistan
  • Paraguay
  • Qatar
  • Romania
  • Senegal
  • Somalia
  • South Africa
  • Sudan
  • Ukraine
  • United Arab Emirates
  • United Kingdom
  • United States of America
  • Uzbekistan
  • Viet Nam

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The human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation The human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation

Access to a sufficient supply of safe, low or no-cost water for drinking, cooking and cleaning is a human right and a universal necessity. To meet World Health Organization (WHO) standards, the nearest safe water source must be no more than one kilometer or a 30 minute walk from an individual’s primary dwelling. To meet all personal and domestic needs, the WHO estimates that each individual in a household should be afforded 50 to 100 liters of water per day. Ensuring the safety of a drinking water source is perhaps the most important consideration, as the wide variety of health conditions and diseases can arise from consuming unsafe water. Accordingly, a source of water must be free of hazardous chemicals and harmful microorganisms to be deemed safe. In addition, the water’s color, odor and taste should not be noticeably unusual.

It is important to note that water facilities also need to be culturally acceptable and sensitive to local customs and norms with regard to gender, age and privacy. Culturally appropriate water facilities are critical because local attitudes towards such facilities can seriously impact the likelihood that they will be used. One example of this phenomenon comes from Senegal, where only half of the schools that incorporated toilet facilities were separated by gender. As a result, many girls avoided these facilities, negatively impacting their ability to concentrate in the classroom. Affordability is another critical aspect of accessibility—United Nations Development Program (UNDP) guidance maintains that the cost of water use should be less than 3 percent of household income.

To take actions towards ensuring the accessibility of safe drinking water and sanitation, the United Nations has hosted conferences, established intergovernmental agencies, and created partnerships and councils. The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade lasted from 1981 to 1990 and served to raise awareness about and encourage the expansion of access to clean water and sanitation. In 1992, the International Conference on Water and the Environment took place in Dublin. In combination, these actions called attention to the need for new and transformational approaches to ensuring water rights and established guiding principles and an action agenda for securing access to water.

Building on the conference of 1992, the First World Water Forum was hosted in Marrakech and the World Commission for Water in the 21st Century was formed in 1997. In 2000, the United Nations Millennium Declaration was adopted, which later became known as the  Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Through 2015, the MDGs established two key priorities related to drinking water: halving the number of people who lack access to safe drinking water and ensuring the sustainability of water supplies through water management strategies. Sanitation, however, was not mentioned in the Millennium Declaration despite severe issues with access to sanitary facilities in multiple regions.

Along the way, many conferences and partnerships were held to discuss water and sanitation access, including the 2001 International Conference on Freshwater hosted in Bonn and the 2002 United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. The International Conference on Freshwater focused on ensuring adequate funding for drinking water infrastructure while keeping costs affordable. This included a lengthy debate on whether privatizing water infrastructure aids or hinders accessibility. The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development paired sanitation with drinking water as a priority in international development, and reiterated the goal first expressed in the MDGs of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water. In 2010, the General Assembly explicitly recognized access to clean water and sanitation as a human right for the first time.

Between 2000 and 2015, the proportion of people without improved drinking water facilities declined from 24 percent to 9 percent. This exceeded the related Millennium Development Goal, which was to halve the proportion of people without improved drinking water to 12 percent. Sanitation, which was less prominent in the MDGs, remained a serious issue, highlighting the importance of aligning development goals to the problems faced in developing countries. In 2015, the Millennium Development Goals were succeeded by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Among other goals, the SDGs are aimed at recognizing the importance of the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, with Sustainable Development Goal 6 dedicated to achieving clean water and sanitation by 2030. In 2019, pursuant to this goal, status reports were conducted on the implementation of Integrated Water Resources Management, a strategy aimed at ensuring that sufficient water is provided in an equitable fashion.

Recent work by the Human Rights Council has focused on better defining the right to drinking water and sanitation, and drawing special attention to groups that have faced barriers in exercising this right. Resolution 45/8, passed in 2020, mentions some of these groups, such as displaced persons, and also suggests that states create judicial remedies for those denied the right to water and sanitation. The resolution also discusses menstrual hygiene as an essential part of the right to sanitation. Resolution 51/19, passed in 2022, focuses primarily on bringing a gender equity perspective to matters of drinking water and sanitation, and also emphasizes that provision of clean drinking water and sanitation facilities is essential to prevent the spread of several communicable diseases such as cholera. As originally commissioned by the General Assembly in 2010, the Human Rights Council has also produced annual reports on the issue. The most recent, from 2022, is centered around bringing the perspectives of indigenous and ancestral cultures to drinking water and sanitation issues. While the report does state that some lessons from those cultures may be usable by broader society, it is focused on ensuring that indigenous people have adequate access to drinking water and sanitation in their homelands or in other rural areas where they have settled. In March 2023, the United Nations Water Conference met for the first time in decades, and collated a range of voluntary commitments to improve water access into the Water Action Agenda.

While significant progress on ensuring access to water and sanitation has been made over the past several decades, several matters remain active subjects of debate and action in the Human Rights Council. First of all, while there is broad agreement that water and sanitation are critical parts of development, their status as a human right remains debated, with some governments questioning the source and enforceability of such a right. A related debate is the relation between the right to water and the privatization and commodification of water supply. Privatizing water utilities has been used as a way to attract additional investment in upgrading water infrastructure, but it can have a negative impact on affordability to the extent that some believe it undermines the human right to water.

Another area of discussion is the framework that should be used to incorporate technological advances in drinking water and sanitation. Resolution 45/10 envisions progress in ensuring the right to drinking water and sanitation as a series of ladders from surface water and open defecation to safely managed access to water. The use of new technologies could help, but there is currently a gap between experimental advanced technologies and their implementation on a large scale, such as the installation of solar-powered water pumps to allow access to groundwater in areas that are not served by an electric grid. In addition, climate change threatens to exacerbate nearly every extant water issue and create a multitude of new ones. According to the Independent Expert on the issue of human rights obligations related to access to drinking water and sanitation, water scarcity due to warming or changes in rainfall patterns is likely to increase the cost of providing water and sanitation infrastructure. The Independent Expert notes that even in particularly water-scarce regions, there is enough water available for personal and domestic use (the uses to which a human right to water applies), but only if such use is prioritized over agricultural and industrial use.

Questions to consider from your country’s perspective:

  • What areas of responsibility for water and sanitation rights fall on governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)? How can the United Nations partner with and assist governments and NGOs in securing water rights?
  • What role should the private sector in general, and international investment in particular, play in upgrading water and sanitation infrastructure? How should governments, NGOs, and IGOs balance attracting investment with ensuring affordable water and sanitation for all?
  • How can the UNHRC secure the rights of groups which disproportionately suffer from a lack of access to safe water and sanitation, such as those who have been displaced or who belong to a marginalized group?

Bibliography Bibliography

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Consequences of child, early and forced marriage Consequences of child, early and forced marriage

Although long prohibited by international law and policy, the practice of child, early and forced marriage remains common worldwide. This practice results from a structurally violent system perpetuated by economic insecurity, gender inequality and disrupted social networks. Early and forced marriage violates the rights of children to education, freedom from violence, access to reproductive and sexual health care, employment, freedom of movement, and the right to consensual marriage. Most common among girls, child marriages are especially common in developing countries: 18.7 percent of young women aged 20–24 in least developed countries were married before the age of 18. Child, early and forced marriage compromises the development of children and leaves them vulnerable to domestic violence.

Since the founding of the United Nations, its human rights agenda has strived to uphold the rights of children. Starting from the assurance in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that men and women of full age have the right to marry, and that marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses, the United Nations developed a trio of conventions that addressed various aspects of the problem of child, early and forced marriage: the 1964 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages, the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Unfortunately, despite widespread adoption of these conventions, they were insufficient to fully resolve these challenges. Exceptions to prohibitions against child marriage in local law allow girls to be married before 18 if parents or judicial bodies give their consent, undermining international legal protections. Although national and international law prohibit child marriage, local legal systems based around religious or customary practices have not followed suit. International conventions often defer to custom and religion, creating exemptions that have slowed the movement to eradicate child, early and forced marriage worldwide. In 2007, the Secretary-General issued a report with recommendations concerning forced marriage, noting how enforcement remained a challenge even after many States enacted laws prohibiting child, early and forced marriage. The report elaborated how States lacked the resources necessary to adequately monitor and enforce their laws and procedures. More broadly, a lack of knowledge about the scope and prevalence of the practice at the national and international levels undermined efforts to monitor progress in addressing the issue.

The United Nations and the Human Rights Council recognize that child, early and forced marriages prevent people from living their lives free from all forms of violence and from accessing the right to education and the right to the highest attainable standard of health, including sexual and reproductive health. The Human Rights Council adopted its first resolution to strengthen efforts to prevent and eliminate child, early and forced marriage in 2013. While the resolution called for a panel discussion with a focus on challenges, achievements, best practices and implementation gaps, it failed to provide Member States with clear, actionable and immediate solutions. In 2015, the Human Rights Council approved a resolution promoting urgency in strengthening efforts to prevent and eliminate child, early and forced marriage and detailed substantive measures to address the human rights violation. Shortly thereafter, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in 2016 launched the UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to Accelerate Action to End Child Marriage. The Global Programme works with governments to uphold the rights of adolescent girls in the 12 Member States that exhibit the highest prevalence of child marriage. By mid-2018, the programme successfully delivered training and resources to over 5.5 million girls, exceeding the programme’s original objective to reach 2.5 million girls by the end of the decade. The Human Rights Council continues to push for solutions to child, early and forced marriage, adopting a resolution in 2019 that calls upon Member States to strengthen family responsive legislation at the national level, such as policies that provide for parental leave and increased flexibility in working arrangements, which aim to create an environment that enables women’s full economic empowerment. On 10 August 2022, the Secretary-General released a report which highlighted the disruption caused by the pandemic to the efforts made to increase the resilience of women, girls and families to child, early and forced marriage. These disruptions, which exacerbated gender inequality and poverty, could increase the number of girls susceptible to child, early and forced marriage by 10 million by the end of the decade, according to UNICEF estimates.

Looking ahead, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which aims to leverage momentum accumulated from years of capacity building by intergovernmental bodies like the Human Rights Council, specifically includes the elimination of the practice of child, early and forced marriage in Goal 5.3. Despite efforts to eliminate child, early and forced marriage, the implementation of international laws and policies has remained slow at the national and international levels. Approximately 650 million girls and women alive today were married before their 18th birthday. Even so, the United Nations and Member States achieved some progress. In the last decade, the proportion of young women who were married as children decreased by 15 percent, from one-in-four to nearly one-in-five. The combination of social upheavals and economic insecurities make the elimination of child, early and forced marriage a challenging global issue, but one that requires urgency to ensure the protection of children.

Questions to consider from your country’s perspective:

  • How can the United Nations facilitate the implementation of existing laws in Member States that prohibit child, early and forced marriage?
  • How can the Human Rights Council balance protecting human rights with respecting the culture and national sovereignty of Member States?
  • What role does the eradication of poverty play in eliminating child, early and forced marriage?

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Bibliography Bibliography

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United Nations Documents United Nations Documents

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