A/HRC/42/47 particular, are sometimes pressured to provide water and sanitation services in public spaces, but lack the means or power to force providers who operate such spaces to do so. 24. Evidence of effective regulation relating to the provision of water and sanitation services in public spaces is generally lacking. However, some Governments have developed and implemented frameworks to ensure access to water and sanitation in such spaces. In the Philippines, for example, pursuant to a presidential decree, specific regulations are in place that govern the design, availability and accessibility of water and sanitation in bus stations. 9 Pursuant to those regulations, the local health officers are mandated to oversee the implementation and enforcement of the regulations in their area. The regulations also specify the standards of provision required by the legislation and set out penalties for failure to adhere to them 25. However, consistency regarding the introduction of legislative and regulatory frameworks relating to services in public spaces is troublingly absent. In some States, those providing water and sanitation services in public spaces are left to simply self-regulate their service provision. Self-regulation internalizes oversight of activities, allowing providers to judge their own actions and inactions against internally determined criteria without independent supervision. In Sri Lanka, water and sanitation provision in public spaces is implemented by local bodies pursuant to local government ordinances. Water provision is then regulated through self-monitoring and quality assurance processes, which utilize the WHO standards for drinking-water quality.10 In other instances, regulations are introduced in the form of non-binding administrative guidelines. In India, the Ministry of Railways has developed a manual for standards and specifications for railway stations, which, it notes, provides direction on many aspects of railway station construction and renovation, including access to water and sanitation, but without imposing any binding requirements on concessionaires.11 26. Where regulatory regimes fail to provide for the essential elements of access to services in public spaces, such as compliance monitoring, those weaknesses may have an impact on the realization of the human rights to water and sanitation. Regulations analysed for the present report are, for instance, largely silent on key human rights principles, such as affordability and non-discrimination, and few contain provisions for monitoring implementation. Even where regulations do follow human rights values, this is often done in a patchwork manner, containing, for example, rules regarding accessibility but not affordability, 12 or protecting one group from discrimination in access, but not others. Typically, regulations aim to ensure some level of parity between men’s and women’s access to public toilets, but in none that the Special Rapporteur has found is the need discussed for any unisex or third-gender toilets to be constructed. Accordingly, despite there being some examples of regulatory frameworks governing access to water and sanitation in public spaces, no State seemingly yet regulates such access from a human rights perspective, constructing their regulations around the normative content of the rights to water and sanitation. C. Accountability framework 27. An absence of national standards against which provision can be judged, or simply a failure to uphold those standards, can severely undermine the enjoyment of the rights to water and sanitation in the context of public spaces by limiting the potential for actors to be held accountable for their actions and failures. In Kenya, for example, while national 9 10 11 12 See Code of Sanitation of the Philippines, Presidential Decree No. 856, chapter IX: Rest areas, bus stops, bus terminals and service stations. See submission from Sri Lanka, available from www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/WaterAndSanitation/SRWater/Pages/PublicSpaces.aspx. Ministry of Railways, Government of India, Manual for Standards and Specifications for Railway Stations, vol. 1 (2009). See, Newfoundland and Labrador, “Public market guidelines” (September 2011); and Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board, Philippines, “Implementing rules and regulations to govern the processing of applications for locational clearance of markets (as amended), B1 (a) and (b)”. 7