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• Author: Barlow, Maude

THESE ARE HARD TIMES. It is particularly distressing in my country (Canada) at the moment as we have the most rightwing government we have ever had (don't ask--it's a long story), busy dismantling a hundred years of environmental and social infrastructure and militarizing our peacekeeping traditions.

But hope is a moral imperative, and I take heart both from the struggles themselves and from the occasional win. Recently, I had the privilege of being at the center of one of those wins, and I am still walking ten feet off the ground.

On July 28, 2010, the United Nations General Assembly voted to recognize the human right to drinking water and sanitation. Two months later, the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a similar resolution that spelled out the responsibilities of governments everywhere to draw up a plan of action to make this new right a reality.

More people die from lack of access to clean water than all forms of violence together. Nevertheless, the struggle to have the human right to clean drinking water and sanitation secured at the United Nations was long and hard.

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Big water and food corporations fought it.

The World Bank, promoting water privatization in developing countries, fought it.

The World Water Council, a powerful institution made up of industry, government, and World Bank officials, fought it.

My government fought it, as did the governments of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and others.

These forces promoted the commodification of water, but a formidable coalition of community activists, indigenous peoples and peasants, public sector unions, and human rights and environmental groups formed a global water justice movement that brought pressure to bear on governments around the world.

We "Water Warriors" never backed down, and key support came quickly from Latin American countries, such as Bolivia and Uruguay. Father Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, Nicaraguan theologian and former Sandinista leader, also was instrumental when he served as president of the U.N. General Assembly. (I was fortunate to serve as his senior adviser on water.)

"Let's see which governments stand up in the General Assembly and vote against the human...