faulker079

(The final installment in the series on water rights :) Alongside interest in public rights that trump the regular water rights of property law, there is much interest in private, human rights that do so. Many systems of water law have long recognized some right to basic water uses superior to other water rights. Islamic law's "right of thirst", the right to take water to quench one's thirst or to water one's animals, applies even to privately owned waters under most schools of Islamic jurisprudence ( Caponera, 1954 ). Under the system of riparian rights, domestic or "natural" uses have preference over other uses ( Beck, 2000 ), and domestic uses also have priority over other uses in most jurisdictions applying the doctrine of prior appropriation ( Trelease, 1955 ). China's water law, too, exempts household and other small quantity uses ( Wouters et al., 2004 ). Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the idea of a right to water framed in...

OAS headquarters in Washington Carmen Gonzalez recently posted "Environmental Racism, American Exceptionalism, and Cold War Human Rights" . The abstract: Environmental justice scholars and activists coined the terms “environmental racism” to describe the disproportionate concentration of environmental hazards in neighborhoods populated by racial and ethnic minorities. Having exhausted domestic legal remedies (or having concluded that these remedies are unavailable), communities of color in the United States are increasingly turning to international human rights law and institutions to challenge environmental racism.  However, the United States has ratified only a handful of human rights treaties, and has limited the domestic application of these treaties through reservations and declarations that preclude judicial enforcement in the absence of implementing legislation. Indeed, the U.S. has generally resisted scrutiny of its human rights record by domestic or international ins...