Transboundary Aquifers between International Water Law and Human Right to Water and Sanitation

This thesis aims to examine the development of international law applicable to Transboundary Aquifers (TBAs) while simultaneously considering Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRWS) that has been adopted in the last decade. This paper’s purpose is to determine how International Water Law (IWL) and the HRWS can be harmonized in the context of TBAs given that the rules and instruments adopted to address this field are relatively nascent and that this field itself is still in the process of developing global regulatory frameworks tackling shared groundwaters. In that sense, the thesis seeks to answer the following question: can IWL and the international human rights agreements complement each other despite the opposing nature of each of these global regulatory frameworks, taking the application of the HRWS to shared groundwaters as a case study? The response to this question requires an analysis of the progressive development of international groundwater law in the general framework of IWL and the challenges facing such development, the evolution of the HRWS through several decades, the nature of transboundary groundwaters, and the interplay between the HRWS and IWL in the context of transboundary groundwaters. The author shall then argue that IWL agreements should include a provision related to the HRWS to ensure the efficiency of this right in the transboundary context and to include such a provision within the nonbinding instrument addressing solely shared groundwaters: the Draft Articles on the Law of Transboundary Aquifers (hereafter Draft Articles) adopted in 2008 through the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution. The author will first examine all the legal matters mentioned above. This introduction will provide a brief overview of the interplay between these different topics.