The Normativity of the Right to Water Revisited

The International Law Reading Group (ILRG) is hosting the third event in its Early Career Research Exchange (ECRE) Series with Faustin Muyembe, PhD candidate at the University of Sherbrooke, Canada. Faustin will be sharing his research focusing on the right to water. The full abstract of his research could be found below:

The right to water ensures access to quality water of adequate amount. This research adopts an open theory of the law, emphasizing that the imperative nature, binding force, and function of the right to water depend on a variety of legal and extra-legal actors. The European Court of Human Rights identifies two key aspects when adjudicating cases of state accountability due to environmental disasters: prevention and repression. Under Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention, the Court has developed a typology of obligations for states. Violations are directly attributable to the state when they result from a total or partial state collapse. They are indirectly attributable when the state’s failure has allowed or tolerated acts that compromise these protected rights. Through this lens, we contend that the partial state collapse of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has either allowed or tolerated recurrent violations of the right to water from 2011 to the present. Therefore, a general clause of state accountability linked to this specific right and its corresponding values deserves to be conceived and articulated. Such a clause emerges from the combination of provisions outlined in Articles 1, 4, 16, 21, and 24 of the African Charter, seen as functional equivalents to the aforementioned Articles 2 and 3. This thesis is confined to repression. Here, we address the issue of violations indirectly attributable to the state of the DRC, duly considering Articles 60/61 of the African Charter. Our research is divided into two parts. Whilst the first part addresses the obligation of individual sanction: its limits and diagnosis, in situ, the second part deals with the obligation of reparation: its gaps and its diagnosis, in situ.

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