Formally acknowledging water as a human right could encourage the international community and governments to enhance their efforts to satisfy basic human needs and to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But critical questions arise in relation to a right to water. What would be the benefits and content of such a right? What mechanisms would be required for its effective implementation? Should the duty be placed on governments alone, or should the responsibility also be borne by private actors? Is another 'academic debate' on this subject warranted when action is really what is necessary? Without claiming to prescribe the answers, this publication clearly and carefully sets out the competing arguments and the challenges.

A collection of United Nations documents associated with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these volumes facilitate research into the scope of, meaning of and intent behind the instrument's provisions. It permits an examination of the various drafts of what became the thirty articles of the Declaration, including one of the earliest documents – a compilation of human rights provisions from national constitutions, organised thematically. The documents are organised chronologically and thorough thematic indexing facilitates research into the origins of specific rights and norms. It is also annotated in order to provide information relating to names, places, events and concepts that might have been familiar in the late 1940s but are today more obscure.

This book challenges several traditional assumptions concerning human rights. In particular it challenges the presumption that the fundamental rights and freedoms contained in the European Convention on Human Rights are irrelevant for cases which concern the sphere of relations betweenindividuals. It asks whether victims should be protected from non-state actors, and attempts to develop a coherent approach to `human rights in the private sphere'. This study concentrates on the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights, and their enforcement in the courts ofthe United Kingdom and at the European level; at the European Commission and Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. In addition, some constitutional cases are examined from the United States and Canadian legal orders. The application ofinternational human rights law to the private sphere has implications for the worlds of labour relations, race relations, discrimination and violence against women, and for victims of indignities everywhere. This study shows that respect for privacy need not mean excluding wrongs in the privatesphere from the world of human rights.