A/68/264 A. Sound legislative, regulatory and institutional frameworks 43. Wastewater management takes place at different levels of government, which interact and overlap. While legislative and policy frameworks are frequently drawn up at the national level, it might be incumbent on local governments to implement them. Also, wastewater is not always a matter of the federal State. Balancing decentralization and central coordination is a major task. Even at the national level, wastewater management tends to be fragmented across different ministries and departments, including health, environment, infrastructure and agriculture, among others. 44. Moreover, wastewater management concerns a host of different actors. Apart from Government actors, international organizations and donors, the private sector and civil society contribute to wastewater management, and coordination is not always ensured. The obligation of States to protect human rights and regulate the activities of third parties as well as the responsibilities of non-State actors therefore come more and more to the fore (see Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (A/HRC/17/31)). 1. Devising appropriate legal frameworks, policies and strategies 45. Water and wastewater are governed by an extensive web of water law and policy, ranging from international to national law, policies, and decrees to local rules and customary law. Water flows across territorial boundaries; hence, its governance also needs to extend beyond national boundaries. Among existing instruments, the 1997 Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses must be noted. While the convention has not yet entered into force, it represents a codification of customary international law to a large extent. Article 7 requires States to take all appropriate measures to prevent the causing of significant harm to other States sharing an international watercourse. 46. The human rights perspective strengthens those obligations. The Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, recently adopted by a group of experts in international law and human rights, underscore the obligation of States to avoid causing harm extraterritorially, stipulating that States must desist from acts and omissions that create a real risk of nullifying or impairing the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights extraterritorially. 30 The principles also affirm the obligation of States to protect human rights extraterritorially, 31 i.e., to take necessary measures to ensure that non-State actors do not nullify or impair the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights. 32 This translates into an obligation to avoid contamination of watercourses in other jurisdictions and to regulate non-State actors accordingly. 47. At the national level, legal frameworks have resulted in vastly different outcomes. On the one hand, they may entrench existing power structures and inequalities or may protect traditional water rights. Integrating human rights requires the reform of relevant water and wastewater law and policy frameworks. What is often __________________ 30 31 32 13-41825 Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations in the area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2011), Principle 13, available from http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/ Institutes/MaastrichtCentreForHumanRights/MaastrichtETOPrinciples.htm. Ibid., Principle 23. Ibid., Principle 24. 13/23