19 March 2004

Law is the key to world poverty

A water expert at the University of Dundee will say next week that despite the public's general mistrust of lawyers, water law is the way to solve world poverty.

On World Water Day (Monday 22nd March) Dr Patricia Wouters will tell all those who are endeavouring to solve world poverty that using legal models to negotiate water disputes is the way to get clean water to the people who most need it and thus solve a crisis that is at the heart of poverty in many countries.

Pat Wouters, Director of the International Water Law Research Institute at the University of Dundee explains: "The River Nile runs through ten different countries in Africa yet Egypt uses 100% of its resources causing major problems of water supply, clean water, hygiene, sanitation and transportation upstream stream in Ethiopia and Eritrea. By using a legal assessment model, governments can put their needs into the legal model and decide how the river’s resources should be divided up between countries."

As UN experts and the Global Water Partnership have stated: "The crisis over the world's scarce water resources is a crisis of governance". Dr Wouters explains "Often the most critical shortcoming in good water governance, at the national, international or transnational levels world-wide is the absence of an effective legal framework". Without this, the world's 1.2 billion people without access to safe drinking water & sanitation", will have no real chance of survival; every 15 seconds a child in the developing world dies from dirty water (Water Aid).

Dundee is the world centre for the study of water law. The International Water Law Research Institute at the University of Dundee is the only centre in the world for studying the legal arbitration of water conflict. The IWLRI also uses its unique expertise in water law to arbitrate water disputes and train ministers from Central Asia, including Afghanistan in the near future, to take a legal approach to solving water disputes in their countries. The IWLRI is convening an international water law conference aimed at providing "tools for implementation by water resource experts around the world" to address the "crisis of governance" in Dundee in August.

The IWLRI is participating in a unique partnership - the Universities Partnership for Transboundary Waters - an international academic consortium of water experts representing ten universities on five continents, which is seeking to promote a global water governance culture. The Partnership is developing an unprecedented educational model, which would offer an opportunity for students from basin states of all of the major international rivers of the world, to be trained by participating universities as world’s future water leaders. Each university will teach its own specific disciplines, such as hydrology, geography, conflict resolution, peace studies, and water law, the latter being delivered by the University of Dundee.

It is expected that the Universities Partnership and the implementation of the legal assessment model will contribute to achieving one of the Millennium Development Goals ensuring equitable access to water at the national and interstate levels.

For more information, contact Dr Wouters on 01382 344456 (office) or 01382 552294 (home) or see the IWLRI website

By Jenny Marra, Head of Press 01382 344910, out of hours: 07968298585, j.m.marra@dundee.ac.uk