water Article The International Law and Politics of Water Access: Experiences of Displacement, Statelessness, and Armed Conflict Carly A. Krakow Department of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science; London WC2A 2AE, UK; c.a.krakow@lse.ac.uk Received: 15 September 2019; Accepted: 23 December 2019; Published: 24 January 2020



 Abstract: This article analyses international law regarding the human right to water as it impacts people who are stateless, displaced, and/or residents of armed conflict zones in the contemporary Middle East. Deficiencies in international law, including humanitarian, water, human rights, and criminal law, are examined to demonstrate international law’s strengths and weaknesses for functioning as a guarantor of essential rights for vulnerable groups already facing challenges resulting from ambiguous legal statuses. What are the political factors causing lack of water access, and what international legal protections exist to protect vulnerable groups when affected by water denial? The analysis is framed by Hannah Arendt’s assertion that loss of citizenship in a sovereign state leaves people lacking “the right to have rights”, as human rights are inextricably connected to civil rights. This article demonstrates that stateless/displaced persons and armed conflict zone residents are disproportionately impacted by lack of water, yet uniquely vulnerable under international law. This paper offers unprecedented analysis of international criminal law’s role in grappling with water access restrictions. I challenge existing “water wars” arguments, instead proposing remedies for international law’s struggle to guarantee the human right to water for refugees/internally displaced persons (IDPs). Examples include Israel/Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. A key original contribution is the application of Arendt’s theory of the totalising impacts of human rights violations to cases of water access denial, arguing that these scenarios are examples of environmental injustice that restrict vulnerable persons’ abilities to access their human rights. Keywords: international law; water law; human right to water; MENA; Middle East; water justice; migration; displacement; armed conflict; statelessness; water governance; Hannah Arendt 1. Introduction [T]he loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether. —Hannah Arendt [1] Water access is commonly associated with scarcity—and discussion of global water challenges is typically accompanied by dire statistics: an estimated 2.1 billion people lack access to safe water at home worldwide [2–5]. Typically accompanying such statistics are heart-wrenching images: women carrying jugs of unpurified water from rivers miles from their homes; families walking across cracked and barren earth in a drought-stricken area; children collecting brown water in broken plastic bottles as it trickles out from a snapped pipe. These images and statistics spell out a major crisis, given that it is estimated that the average person can survive no more than several days without drinking water in temperate conditions Water 2020, 12, 340; doi:10.3390/w12020340 www.mdpi.com/journal/water