Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, Ha’aretz, reports, “The right to water is a basic human right deserving of constitutional protection by virtue of the constitutional right to human dignity, the Supreme Court (of Israel) ruled yesterday. Recently retired Justice Ayala Procaccia, along with justices Edna Arbel and Joseph Alon, published their ruling yesterday on an appeal by six Bedouin (the predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group) residents of non-recognized communities in the Negev (a desert region of southern Israel). The appellants had sought the overturn of a 2006 ruling by the water affairs tribunal rejecting their application to be connected to a Mekorot (Israel’s national water company) water company main.”
“(However), when considering the request of people living in an illegal community to connect their homes to water, the authorities may take the illegality of their residence into account, the verdict stated. People living in illegal communities, also known as unrecognized communities, get their water either by buying it at a central location and transporting it to their home at their own expense, or by obtaining permission from the water committee. The committee has the authority to recommend that a home be connected to the water main out of humanitarian considerations. The court determined that two of the appellants had reasonable access to water. In the case of a third appellant, the court directed that his home be connected to the water main. As for the three others, the court said it was unclear from the information provided by the state whether they had reasonable access to water in the event their homes were not connected to the water main. The court ordered the water committee to revisit the cases.”
“Attorney Sausan Zahar, head of the unit for socioeconomic rights of the human rights group Adalah (the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel), which represented the appellants, said yesterday that although the Supreme Court decision was important in principle, it was unfortunate that, particularly in light of previous verdicts that totally negated the rights of these residents, the Supreme Court did not rule that they were entitled to water on an equal footing with other Israeli citizens. ‘Instead, the court ruled that they had a right to ‘minimal access to water sources’, Zahar said. ‘In its ruling, the court gave undue weight to the fact that the villages are unrecognized although most of the residents are not squatters and (successive) governments are to blame for the irregularity of their status,’ Zahar said.”
Blue Planet Project organizer Anil Naidoo comments, “Now, similar to the great victory of the Bushmen in Botswana, we have a ruling in favour of the Bedouin in the Negev. Both of these cases had lower court rulings that went against the human right to water before the July 28th 2010 resolution, but these were reversed by higher courts which then cited the subsequent recognition of the human right to water at the United Nations. Legally, we need to look more deeply into the implications of this case, but it does point to a positive trend that we should celebrate.”
The article is at http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/court-rules-water-a-basic-human-right-1.366194.
