Every 22 March, the world observes World Water Day, an event created to “focus attention on the importance of freshwater and advocate for the sustainable management of freshwater resources”. This year’s theme of “leaving no one behind”, means that collaboration is essential.

Jorge Viñuales, Harold Samuel Chair of Law at Cambridge University and Adjunct Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute, is also Chairperson of the Compliance Committee of the UNECE/WHO-Europe Protocol on Water and Health. As Chair, together with his colleagues, he manages the Protocol’s compliance system, ensuring that European states – and other states of the Pan-European region bound by the Protocol – fulfill their obligations to provide access to clean drinking water and sanitation to their population. The Protocol is the first international agreement of its kind that aims to protect human health and well-being through better water management and by preventing, controlling and reducing water-related diseases.

“There are different ways in which international law approaches the issue of the rights to water and sanitation”, said Professor Viñuales. “One is the human rights approach that has been developed essentially under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as well as in the context of the Human Rights Council […] and there is a second approach, […] which is a more regulatory approach, where there is a system that is introduced in order to keep the issue of [rights and] access to water and sanitation under certain parameters.”

Also actively involved is Professor Léo Heller, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, who travels the world promoting respect for the human rights to water and sanitation.

In a video interview, Professors Viñuales and Heller discuss the importance of the Protocol and how its enforcement is critical to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.