With the sudden passing of Catarina de Albuquerque on 7 October 2025, the human rights community has lost a champion whose contribution to the promotion of socio-economic rights in the last twenty years can hardly be overstated. Many of us have also lost a dear colleague and mentor.

Born in Lisbon in 1970, Catarina studied law at the University of Lisbon and pursued a master in international law at the prestigious Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Since 2018, she served as CEO of Water and Sanitation for All (WSA), a global partnership initiative of governments and NGOs dedicated to universal access to water and adequate sanitation. In the human rights community, Catarina is known for her pioneering work on the human rights to water and sanitation and on the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (OPICESCR) – and for her inexhaustible optimism any human rights lawyer needs nowadays.

Access to safe drinking water and sanitation as human rights

Catarina was pivotal for the recognition of water and sanitation as human rights since the late 2000s. She was the first United Nations Independent Expert (later: Special Rapporteur) on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation (2008–2014). Noticeably, in the first mandate the Human Rights Council gave her, States were not yet prepared to call water and sanitation human rights. Instead, they used the complicated phrasing of “Independent Expert on the issue of human rights obligations related to access to safe drinking water and sanitation” (para. 2) when naming the new mandate in the resolution. Catarina managed to reframe water and sanitation: shifting the perspective from States’ interests related to infrastructure or public health to matters of individual rights. During her UN mandate, she travelled to all continents and was welcomed by, among others, the governments of Brazil, Thailand, Kenya or the USA – some of which were certainly not easy to convince to allow such visit. Catarina’s influential thematic reports included important topics such as the MDGs and water and sanitation, stigmatization and non-discrimination in the WASH sector. While General Comment No. 15 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights had already established a comprehensive normative framework identifying the key elements of the right to water – including availability, quality, and accessibility – in her various reports, Catarina put meat on the bone by showing what this should mean in practice. In all her work, she was always very “hands on”, not shying away from difficult topics such as financing (the often assumed to be expensive realization of socio-economic rights) or concretely naming common State violations. One issue particularly close to Catarina’s heart was the often-neglected field of sanitation. She made clear early onwards in her mandate that she understood sanitation not as part of the right to water, but a right in its own right (para. 59). Catarina succeeded: when her mandate was renewed in 2011, it was henceforth called UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation (para. 4). Another noteworthy achievement of hers is that she always worked with, and not against, the private sector. She never demonized water companies; to the contrary, she made clear in some of her early reports that water and sanitation can only be realized as human rights when working together with private actors.

The most eventful year of Catarina’s mandate was certainly 2010. The adoption of the UN General Assembly Resolution 64/292 in July 2010 was ground-breaking in recognizing access to safe drinking water and sanitation as a (joint) human right. The recognition came sooner and in different form than planned by Catarina: she herself at the time was not entirely sure whether a vote in the Human Rights Council would be preferable, but a handful of States, spearheaded by Bolivia, had pushed for a vote already in the GA. The GA Resolution received solid support, but still some 41 States showed hesitancy and abstained. In October 2010, the Human Rights Council followed course, and here Catarina’s analytical clarity and diplomatic perseverance came to show: only three months later, no State could resist Catarina’s persuasiveness any longer. The Human Rights Council Resolution 15/9 on water and sanitation as human rights was adopted without a vote: no State disagreed. These both recognitions were certainly influential in the inclusion of water and sanitation in the language of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), in particular SDG 6. This includes target 6.1, which aims “by 2030, [to] achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all”, and target 6.2, which aims to achieve “by 2030 […] access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all”.

Pioneer for the justiciability of socio-economic rights

A second of Catarina’s achievements, though somewhat overshadowed by her work as Special Rapporteur, is even more ground-breaking for socio-economic rights in general. Before her mandate as Special Rapporteur, from 2004 to 2008, Catarina had led the Open-Ended Working Group on the Optional Protocol to the ICESCR. At a time when many regarded economic, social and cultural rights as (internationally) non-justiciable programmatic aspirations, and hopes for change were left to dreamers, Catarina skilfully navigated political and conceptual divisions to forge consensus for an individual complaints mechanism before the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESC-Committee). In her own description of the process, she depicts in an impressive manner how delicate and challenging this exercise was. Nonetheless, in Resolution 63/117 of December 2008, the UN General Assembly, by consensus, established a historic precedent: potential victims of violations of rights under the ICESCR – such as health, housing, food, education, work and social security – can henceforth seek international remedy before the ESC-Committee against their home State. In 2013, the Protocol entered into force. While promoting socio-economic rights globally remains an uphill struggle – given that important States such as the USA have not ratified the ICESCR, and only 31 States have ratified the Optional Protocol so far – the Protocol nonetheless represents one of the most significant advances in the protection of economic, social and cultural rights since the ICESCR entered into force in 1976. Over 120 communications have so far been considered by the ESC-Committee, and the Protocol has become an integral part of international socio-economic rights protection today.

Catarina’s recognition and legacy

Catarina’s contributions have been recognized through numerous distinctions, including the Gold Medal for Human Rights of the Portuguese Parliament and the Order of Merit of the Portuguese Republic (both in 2009). She received an honorary doctorate by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015, was guest professor at the law faculties of the Universities of Braga and Coimbra (both in Portugal) as well as at the American University’s Washington College of Law and at the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratization in Venice.

The wave of public condolences and expressions of empathy following her sudden death has been remarkable. Catarina has sometimes been described to me as the “mother” of the human rights to water and sanitation – and this is how she will be remembered. Moreover, she redefined the boundaries of economic, social and cultural rights more broadly, successfully advocating for their justiciability and tirelessly emphasizing the potential these rights hold.

With respect to water, much has been achieved over the last ten years. Between 2015 and 2024, access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) has steadily improved. Now, 74 per cent of the global population use safely managed drinking water (up from 68 per cent in 2015), safely managed sanitation coverage has increased by 10 percentage points to 58 per cent over the same period, and coverage of basic hygiene services has grown from 66 to 80 per cent (see p. 20 for the figures). Despite these positive developments – for which Catarina deserves credit as well – important challenges remain. In 2024, still 2.2 billion people had no access to safely managed drinking water, 3.4 billion were without safely managed sanitation and 1.7 billion lacked basic hygiene services at home (see p. 20). Access is also hugely unequal – between the global north and the global south, but also between urban and rural communities.

Catarina has often stated that water scarcity and lack of access to sanitation and hygiene are not a technical or environmental problem, but a political one. The solution to the problem is also political. One can only hope that States, corporations, and NGOs will continue to make access to water, sanitation, and hygiene a priority in politics – even without Catarina’s charming but admonishing voice to constantly remind them of it.

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