From Courtrooms to Prevention: Rethinking the Human Right to Water

More than a decade after the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation in 2010, the right exists firmly on paper but far less reliably in practice. A new Comment published in Nature Water on 19 October 2026 argues that the central obstacle is no longer legal recognition but implementation, and that the way forward demands a fundamental shift in orientation: from responding to violations after harm has occurred to anticipating and preventing them before they happen. The article, authored by Marc F. Müller of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, together with Ellis A. Adams of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, Julie C. Faure of Eawag, and Diane A. Desierto of Notre Dame Law School, forms part of a series contributing to the 2026 UN Water Conference.

The authors’ core claim is deceptively simple but consequential. The human right to water is well established in international law, yet putting it into practice remains difficult across the enormously diverse hydrological, social and governance contexts in which water is actually managed, allocated and contested. A right that is universally recognized can still be systematically unrealized if the mechanisms for enforcing it only activate once a violation has already produced harm. By that point, contaminated aquifers may take decades to recover, displaced communities may never return, and litigation may drag on for years while people continue to drink unsafe water. Prevention, the authors contend, must therefore become the organizing principle of realization.

The legal architecture supporting the right to water is substantial. The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights articulated the right in General Comment No. 15 in 2002, defining water as an indispensable element for life and specifying obligations of availability, quality and accessibility. The 2010 General Assembly resolution, adopted in Document A/RES/64/292, gave the right explicit political endorsement. Regional jurisprudence has since added teeth: the Inter-American Court of Human Rights addressed the right in its 2020 judgment in Indigenous Communities of the Lhaka Honhat Association v. Argentina, and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights did so in the landmark Endorois case concerning Kenya, decided in 2010. These decisions demonstrate that courts and quasi-judicial bodies are willing to adjudicate water rights claims, including those brought by Indigenous communities whose access to water is intertwined with territory and culture.

Yet litigation, however important, is inherently a remedy-oriented instrument. The Comment points to cases such as the Vedanta Resources lawsuit over water contamination in Zambia, tracked by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, as emblematic of a pattern in which affected communities seek redress through courts after pollution has already degraded the water sources on which they depend. Such cases can produce compensation, cleanup orders and important legal precedents, but they arrive late in the causal chain. The authors argue that a system focused on remedy treats the human right to water as something to be vindicated in retrospect, rather than something to be secured in advance through the everyday decisions of governments, utilities and water-intensive industries.

The alternative the authors propose is a proactive, contextual approach that links water-security and governance conditions to the specific challenges of realizing the right in a given place. Water insecurity is not produced by the same mechanisms everywhere. In one basin, the binding constraint may be physical scarcity amplified by climate variability; in another, it may be groundwater depletion driven by agricultural pumping; in a third, it may be institutional fragmentation, corruption or the simple absence of infrastructure investment. A contextual approach begins by diagnosing which of these conditions dominate, and then asks how the right to water is most likely to be threatened under those conditions, and by whom. This diagnostic step transforms the right from an abstract legal entitlement into a forward-looking risk assessment.

Central to this framework is the concept of due diligence, a well-developed tool in both international human rights law and the governance of business conduct. The UN Human Rights Council’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, adopted in 2011, established that companies have a responsibility to respect human rights, which includes conducting due diligence to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for adverse impacts. The Comment argues that existing due-diligence and stewardship processes, already embedded in corporate practice and increasingly in regulation, can be strengthened by connecting them explicitly to the human right to water. Instead of treating human rights due diligence as a compliance exercise performed in the abstract, water users would assess how their withdrawals, discharges and infrastructure decisions interact with the water-security conditions of the communities around them, and whether those interactions could foreseeably impair the right.

This orientation toward anticipation has particular relevance for water-intensive industries, including mining, agriculture, energy production and manufacturing, whose operations can alter both the quantity and the quality of water available to surrounding populations. The authors draw on their earlier work, including a guide for water-intensive industries titled Water and Human Rights, Unlocked, published through the University of Notre Dame’s Pulte Institute, which developed the Realizing Rights for Water framework referenced in the Comment. The framework, developed as part of a broader research project supported financially by the mining company BHP, which had no role in the design, analysis or conclusions of the research, is designed to help such industries understand where and how their activities may intersect with human rights obligations related to water. The authors declare no other competing interests.

The preventive agenda also extends beyond the private sector to the evolving scope of rights themselves. In 2022, the UN General Assembly recognized the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in Resolution A/RES/76/300, a development that broadens the legal terrain on which water-related harms can be anticipated and contested. Scholars have also increasingly emphasized the rights of ecosystems and the interdependencies between human water security and environmental flows, connecting the human right to water with broader questions of ecological stewardship. A preventive approach, the authors suggest, is well suited to this expanded landscape because it asks decision-makers to consider the full downstream consequences of water governance choices, rather than waiting for discrete, legally cognizable injuries to materialize.

The timing of the Comment is deliberate. It is part of a series supported by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health as part of the UN-Water initiative to support evidence-based policymaking in the water sector, contributing to the 2026 UN Water Conference. That conference arrives at a moment when global water challenges, from aquifer depletion to pollution to the hydrological disruptions of a warming climate, are intensifying faster than governance systems are adapting. The authors’ contribution to this policy moment is to insist that the human right to water should function not only as a standard against which failures are judged, but as a design principle for the systems that allocate and manage water every day.

The practical implication is a reordering of priorities. Rather than measuring progress primarily by the number of violations remedied, courts satisfied or compensation packages negotiated, a prevention-oriented realization of the right would measure how effectively water-security risks are identified before they become harms, how well governance institutions anticipate the distributional consequences of allocation decisions, and how systematically due-diligence processes incorporate the perspectives of the communities whose rights are most exposed. The authors acknowledge that this is demanding: it requires contextual knowledge, institutional capacity and political will in settings where all three are often scarce. But their argument is ultimately one of efficiency as well as justice. Preventing the contamination of a drinking-water source is almost always cheaper, faster and less destructive than remediating it, and preventing the erosion of a community’s access to water preserves not only a legal right but the social and ecological conditions on which that right depends. In making the case for moving from remedy to prevention, the Comment reframes the human right to water as a tool for governing water proactively, before the harm that would otherwise define it has already been done.

Subject of Research: Governance approaches to realizing the human right to water through prevention rather than remedy

Article Title: Realizing the human right to water means moving from remedy to prevention

Article References: Müller, M. F., Adams, E. A., Faure, J. C., & Desierto, D. A. (2026). Realizing the human right to water means moving from remedy to prevention. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-026-00740-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44221-026-00740-8

Keywords: human right to water, water governance, water security, prevention, due diligence, human rights law, water policy, UN Water Conference, business and human rights, Nature Water, Realizing, human