There is perhaps no right more basic and fundamental than the right to Water and Sanitation,the very foundations of life itself.
Sustainable Development Goal 6 emphasizes how climate change is degrading water sources worldwide and threatening the health and well-being of billions of people.

However, there has yet to be sufficient attention given to one of the most glaring transgressions of the rights to Water and Sanitation that occurs throughout the globe; that is, the active exclusion of people from Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent (CDWD) from clean water sources and the oppressive labor systems that result in them working in highly unsanitary conditions.

Sanitation

Discrimination based on work and descent has historically been inextricably linked to issues of unacceptable sanitary conditions. Historically, CDWD such as Dalits in South Asia, the Burakumin in Japan, the Roma in Europe, the Quilombo in Brazil, the Al-Akhdam in Yemen, and a wide variety of groups in Africa such as the Osu in Nigeria and the Haratin in Mauritania have been forced through slavery, bonded labor or similar systems of hierarchical oppression into work that is unsanitary and damaging to an individual’s health. It is because of this work that these communities have been labeled as “Polluted” or “Untouchable,” and it is because they have been labelled as such that they have been segregated from the community at large and denied access to basic resources such as sanitation and water. Thus, we see that the issue of sanitation in the case of CDWD is a twofold issue of discrimination; the extreme discrimination they face forces them into unsanitary conditions, and the unsanitary conditions they live in result in only further discrimination and segregations.