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 United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In this novel application of analytic coding methods to 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 results raise an imperative for universal human rights indicators on the rights to water and sanitation, providing an empirical basis to develop universal indicators that would streamline reporting to human rights treaty bodies, facilitate monitoring of state reports, and ensure accountability for human rights implementation.