Samaa Moustafa

Shortcoming of Water Rights Doctrines: Political and Social Complications of Shared Scarce Water Resources Samaa Moustafa

This research considers how the Nile water crisis is perceived through academia, international law, and through political negotiations. The dominant approach to dealing with the increasing water shortages, due to population growth of riparian states and environmental degradation of the Nile, is politically oriented. There is a dominance of this approach, although it's limited in eradicating the problems which arise in addressing shared watercourses and resources among states as it concerns the human rights of citizens to water. There have been academic works relating to the human right to water indirectly under the umbrella of human rights and environmental conventions, yet there exists no legally binding framework that correlates with the human right to fresh water resources specifically, within conventions concerning human rights. The region's water crisis relates to both quantity and quality, but the latter is not as emphasized. The crisis studied here acknowledges primarily the deficiencies of management through fragmented institutions, inadequate policies and deficient legal systems, insufficient funding for water supply and pollution control, and shortage of political will.