The Water Shutoffs and the United Nations Statement

In the spring and summer of twenty fourteen, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department began shutting off water service to residential accounts that were behind on their bills. The pace of the shutoffs was substantial. By mid-summer, the department had shut off service to more than seventeen thousand households, and city officials projected the number would reach an estimated one hundred thousand by the end of the year if the pace continued.

The neighborhoods most affected were the low-income residential areas of the city, which were predominantly Black. Detroit was simultaneously going through federal bankruptcy proceedings, and the water utility carried hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that was part of the restructuring negotiation. The city's position was that it needed to collect unpaid bills to demonstrate to creditors that the utility could function as a viable going concern.

Catarina de Albuquerque and Leilani Farha, Special Rapporteurs for the United Nations Human Rights Council on the human right to water and sanitation, issued a public statement in June of twenty fourteen declaring that the shutoffs, if carried out as described, would constitute a violation of the international human right to water. It was among the first times a United Nations human rights body had publicly directed such a statement at the United States government at the municipal level. The city continued the shutoffs. The federal bankruptcy proceeding did not directly address the question of human rights to essential services.

The precise total number of households shut off that summer is contested, with different counts from the city, from advocacy organizations, and from academic researchers using different methodologies. What is not contested is the scale, the geography, and the population that bore it.