Water 2020, 12, 340 5 of 28 The Geneva Conventions, the cornerstone of IHL, address “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population”, including “drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works” in international and non-international armed conflict [34,35]. The Additional Protocols are concerned with destruction of civilian water infrastructure only during violent conflict and do not address procedures for redress once civilian water access has been negatively impacted. As Weiss notes, “There is no clear provision holding States liable for significant harm” to civilian water resources [26]. With the advent of international justice institutions in the past decades, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993 and the International Criminal Court in 2002, transitional justice mechanisms have evolved substantially, but means for protecting rights of stateless and displaced individuals, especially in the midst of conflict, remain inaccessible. As Shahram Khosravi remarks, although human rights are addressed in international conventions and are applicable to stateless and undocumented immigrants, they are “inaccessible to many of those who need them”, a dilemma that “exemplifies the ‘abstractedness’ of the law . . . availability in terms of international conventions and declarations” but “inaccessibility to those concretely in need of it” [36]. Khosravi describes Hannah Arendt as “the first to highlight the dilemma embedded in the condition of statelessness in the modern world”, having observed post-WWII in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), “the condition of statelessness not only rendered individuals immobile, but also caused them to be neglected and abandoned by the very conventions and declarations created for them” [36]. On the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Khosravi adds: For Arendt there was only one human right, and it was the ‘right to have rights’ . . . the right to claim one’s rights. According to Arendt, the fundamental problem with the UDHR is [dependency] on the nation-state system . . . The territorialization of human rights in the form of a system of nation states reduces human rights to citizen rights . . . Outside the nation-state system, there is no space for humanity. There is no space for . . . the pure human being in herself, beyond legal and political status. [36] Protections of the human right to water for the stateless and displaced have followed in the UDHR tradition, replicating weaknesses identified by Arendt seven decades ago. To identify and analyse these deficiencies, one need not commit to “exaggerated claims about the ‘end’ of the state system” or “call for . . . world citizenship” [37]. Water access concerns do, however, present serious challenges to international law, in which enforceability is dependent on nation-state ratification of treaties that are “binding on signatory states alone and can be brazenly disregarded by non-signatories and, at times, even by signatory states themselves” [37]. Seyla Benhabib notes, “Democracies should be judged not only by how they treat their members but by how they treat their strangers” [38]. If we regard the stateless as ‘estranged’ from the nation-state system, and therefore at greater distance from international protections dependent upon the nation-state system as compared with their citizen counterparts, should we not hold the international justice system to the same standards as we aspire to hold our democracies—judging it not by how it handles the rights of those neatly categorised but by how it protects, or fails to protect, those who fall outside the bounds of states or who are citizens of states unable or unwilling to defend their rights? International law regarding the human right to water does not currently rise to this challenge. As Philippe Cullet notes, “the traditional distinction between ‘law’ and ‘policy’ has become blurred at the international and national levels in recent decades in the water sector”, resulting in a transnational conflation between policy recommendations and obligatory laws [39]. As “there is no binding international law framework or even well established soft law framework developed within the UN context underlying water sector reforms” [39], there are voids within international law regarding the human right to water. All we really have are “gloss” [39] and UN “froth” [26] that state the importance of a human right to water but consistently fail to define this essential right in any detail or lay out repercussions for violations.