California’s Human Right to Water Law HRTW law, passed in 2012, marked the first successful state statute to define water as a human right and ushered in subsequent legal and policy actions that materially improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The HRTW law itself, however, created no requirements for action and no local responsibility for its implementation. Rather, the law, like many human rights frameworks, is aspirational. … This article examines the narrative and legal framework of human rights violation and assesses whether it could be applied to the HRTW law to accelerate its implementation.
-Written by Max Gomberg, an independent consultant for equitable and climate resilient water policy who worked for the State Water Resources Control Board.