A/HRC/24/44 useful tools in monitoring implementation and guiding stakeholders. Before implementation, environmental, social and specific human rights impact assessments can help in deciding if proposed policies will have a retrogressive effect, or if they will be sustainable. Likewise, after implementation, ex post human rights impact assessments are an important tool that governments can use to discharge their obligation to monitor the implementation of the rights to water and sanitation. 82. Independent regulation to ensure water quality, accessibility, reliability and affordability is also key to implementing and monitoring the rights to water and sanitation. It is the role of a regulator to ensure a fair distribution of service coverage and promote a focus on serving the poorer neighbourhoods, since those residents are less likely to be able to gain access to water and sanitation services. F. Accountability and justiciability 83. Sustainable, long-term realization of the rights to water and sanitation demands accountability. Accountability, likewise, is interrelated with and based on other principles, such as transparency, access to information and participation. Accountability requires States to provide effective remedies for breaches of the rights to water and sanitation. For this, a legal framework, appropriate policies, functioning institutions, and the necessary procedures and mechanisms must exist so that individuals and communities can seek redress and secure their rights to water and sanitation. The rights to water and sanitation are justiciable human rights, and should be recognized as such by governments and courts. 84. In the water and sanitation sectors, accountability can also be enhanced, and the sustainability of the sectors improved, by fighting corruption and opaque decision-making by agencies lacking transparency. There are a variety of ways that States can work to address this, inter alia through integrity pacts between NGOs such as Transparency International and government agencies, 73 and broad-based partnerships, which, among other things, seek to improve accountability at a local level. National human rights institutions are also engaged in a number of activities which help to foster greater accountability in the sectors. Where such mechanisms are established during times of “normalcy”, they can be maintained during times of economic and financial crisis. V. Conclusions and recommendations 85. The Special Rapporteur considers sustainability to be a fundamental human rights principle essential for realizing the human rights to water and sanitation. She understands sustainability as the direct counterpart to retrogression; it requires that services be available and accessible to everyone on an almost permanent basis, without discrimination, while ensuring beneficial change through quality services and sustained behavior change. Water and sanitation must be available for present and future generations, and the provision of services today should not compromise the future ability to realize these human rights. Understanding sustainability from a human rights perspective greatly contributes to achieving lasting solutions to water and sanitation challenges for present and future generations. 73 For example, the integrity pact between Transparency International Pakistan and the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board. 21