Keywords
State Duty to Protect
Business-Related Human Rights
BITs
How to Cite
Abstract
The Human Right to Water and Sanitation —HRWS— has called primary attention since General Comment No. 15 (GC 15) —issued in 2002 by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, CESCR— interpreted articles 11 and 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Since then, much has been written on this human right, but very little on the existing linkage between it and private corporations providing public water and sanitation services (WSS), and even less on the regulatory and Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) implications of the state's duty to protect this right.
This article will therefore study the state's duty to protect from business-related human rights violations in the specific field of WSS from two interrelated perspectives. On one hand, the domestic regulatory front, which raises questions such as: Should regulation of private water and sanitation companies be based on human rights standards? If so, to what extent? What are the concrete regulatory implications of the two previous responses? Has existing case law outlined minimum regulatory standards based on international human rights norms?
On the other hand, in terms of international liability, the following questions are crucial: How should we interpret BITs that protect foreign companies providing water and sanitation in light of the state's duty to protect from business-related human rights violations? How to reconcile the state's BITs commitments with its obligations under human rights treaties in WSS? Do we need to reconcile them at all?
This journal is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
Approving the intervention of the work (review, copy-editing, translation, layout) and the following outreach, are granted through an use license and not through an assignment of rights. This means the journal and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana cannot be held responsible for any ethical malpractice by the authors. As a consequence of the protection granted by the use license, the journal is not required to publish recantations or modify information already published, unless the errata stems from the editorial management process. Publishing contents in this journal does not generate royalties for contributors.