Human Rights Accountability through Treaty Bodies : Examining Human Rights Treaty Monitoring for Water and Sanitation

Framing scholarship on human rights accountability through treaty bodies, this article examines the water and sanitation content of state human rights reporting to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Through analytic coding of state human rights reports, the authors trace the relationship between human rights advancements on water and sanitation and treaty body monitoring of water and sanitation systems. These empirical results raise an imperative for universal human rights indicators on the rights to water and sanitation, providing a basis to develop indicators that would streamline reporting to human rights treaty bodies, facilitate monitoring of state reports, and facilitate accountability for human rights implementation