A/HRC/42/47 31. Where the operation of water and sanitation services is delegated to a private actor by the State, it is commonly achieved through a contract that may or may not include provision for water and sanitation in public spaces. Since few contracts include this provision, private providers are at liberty to refuse to facilitate such services. Even when private providers are obliged to provide services in public spaces, the standards with which they must comply may also be unclear, because the terms of their contracts may not always be publicly disclosed.19 Equally, the fragmentation of responsibility through privatization generates significant concerns, as human rights provisions do not directly bind them and they are often under no direct legal duty to abide by them, unless they are required to do so under the regulatory framework of the State in question. 32. Secondly, in order to comply with the principle of accountability, water and sanitation providers must be answerable to the beneficiaries of their services and be required to provide explanations and reasoned justifications for their actions, inactions and decisions to the people affected by them, as well as the public at large (A/73/162, para. 34). This dimension of accountability is commonly hindered by a failure of those in control of public spaces to provide mechanisms to allow people to complain about breaches of their human rights to water or sanitation, or when they only do so in exclusionary and inaccessible ways. In Sacramento, United States of America, no dedicated mechanisms were available to allow homeless people to challenge the decision taken by the city authorities to shut public toilets so as to force them to leave the city, with the issue instead having to be raised by the previous Special Rapporteur and local NGOs.20 In New York City, although a procedure is in place to allow people to raise complaints about damaged or dirty automatic public toilets or to request the placement of a new public toilet, it is only accessible online, which is likely to exclude people experiencing extreme poverty and homelessness from the accountability process. 33. In other instances, independent regulators and ombudspersons covering water and sanitation services rarely have their mandates extended to cover public space provision, thus placing these services in a grey area in terms of answerability. Even where complaints have been raised with ombudspersons in this matter, the lack of specific national standards leaves these claims to be addressed though breaches of other standards, such as those governing equality, rather than those based upon the normative content of the human rights to water and sanitation. In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, a complaint was raised with the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman regarding a city council charging fees for the use of public toilets, but not for urinals, meaning women had to pay, while men did not. The matter was decided in favour of the complainant; however, the decision was based on the practice in question breaching national gender discrimination legislation, rather than on specific standards for water and sanitation in public spaces. 34. Thirdly, States must have the ability to ensure compliance with standards through enforceability, a notion which comprises the establishment of bodies capable of overseeing compliance, as well as the provision of forums in which people may bring challenges regarding the decisions or inactions of the actor concerned and which are capable of satisfying claimants’ right to an effective remedy (A/73/162, para. 59). Without the establishment of an adequate accountability framework, claims to ensure rights are respected, protected and fulfilled in this context become significantly harder, if not impossible, to make effectively. Consequently, the rights to water and sanitation in public spaces may be breached with impunity and those rights will go unfulfilled. Wellfunctioning systems of accountability must explicitly recognize that the rights to water and sanitation apply in public spaces and include implementation mechanisms to assist people to claim those rights and make complaints when they are breached. 19 20 See submission from Mozambique. See National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, “Human rights to human reality. A 10-step guide to strategic human rights advocacy” (2014). 9