A/71/302 sanitation projects supported through development cooperation, including water resources policy and administrative management programmes at the national, regional and the watershed levels, at the level of large water and sanitation systems for cities and at the local level for basic drinking water and sanitation systems for rural areas and low-income communities in urbanized areas. 41. The Special Rapporteur has reviewed relevant policy documents from the State funders who have dedicated the greatest amount of funds to development cooperation in the water and sanitation sector. The review was not intended to be exhaustive nor was it intended to make a critical judgment, but rather provides an overview of the approaches and points of view of the funding States, based on relevant official documents. Some funding States mention the human right s to water and sanitation or a human rights-based approach at the framework level in their policy documents. However, there is no evidence that funding States systematically apply the human rights approach to water and sanitation as a necessary criterion in the selection of projects to be financed. The choice of financing a specific activity seems to depend much more on the funder’s global strategy and the country’s demand. Even when the human rights to water and sanitation are exceptionally mentioned in the initial project assessment documents, once the project is implemented, those rights are not specifically referred to in the main planning and assessment tools, such as the annual operating plans and the project monitoring documents. 42. The broad conclusion is that explicit commitments to human rights in the development cooperation policies of funders constitute a heterogeneous patchwork. There are some notable cases in which the overall approach to cooperation policy, at least as set forth in official documents, is based on the human rights framework. For example, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland published a policy document that stated that the Government’s development policy programme for 2012 required that a human rights-based approach be implemented in all development policy and development cooperation practiced by Finland. 25 Similarly, a framework document of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany, 26 contained an affirmation of human rights as one of the guiding principles fo r German development policy. The Federal Ministry also stated that its human rights strategy was complemented by operational guidelines specifying how to assess human rights-related risks and impact in the appraisal phase of all development programmes commissioned by the Ministry. A pioneering document from the Federal Ministry on translating theory into practice with respect to the human right s to water and sanitation indicated that its policy was based on a review of experience in Kenya in 2007 and that the experience in Kenya showed that a human rightsbased approach to water and sanitation could be successfully pursued, gradually leading to sustainable benefits for all. 27 Other relevant approaches include that of the Republic of Korea of laying the foundation for reflecting a human rights-based approach in the whole programme cycle from the design to implementation phases; __________________ 25 26 27 16-13590 Finland, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Guidelines: Implementing the Human Rights-Based Approach in Finland’s Development Policy (2013), p. 1. Germany, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, The Human RightsBased Approach in German Development Cooperation (2014), p. 3. Germany, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the German Technical Cooperation, The Human Right to Water and Sanitation: Translating Theory Into Practice (Eschborn, Germany, 2009), p. 2. 13/24