While Flint and Detroit have made national headlines, the Program supports the struggles that garner less national and international attention, such as the lack of sanitation and wastewater services. Across the country, many rural communities lack access to one of the most basic services: sanitation. Failing wastewater infrastructure leads to the perpetual presence of wastewater in and around homes and takes a significant toll on individuals' mental and physical health. The project partners with the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise, EarthJustice, and other organizations and seeks to raise awareness through reports, briefings and other advocacy. The Program also collaborates with the Centre on Law and Social Transformation at the University of Bergen in a transnational project on
“Elevating water rights to human rights: Has it strengthened marginalized peoples’ claim for water?”
- Inga Winkler and JoAnn Kamuf Ward, The United States’ Global Water Strategy must recognize these rights at home, OpenGlobalRights, 2019
- Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise, Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic, and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Flushed and Forgotten: Sanitation and Wastewater in Rural Communities in the US, 2019
- Congressional Briefing on the Sanitation and Wastewater Crisis in Rural Communities Across the US, Washington DC, May 2019
- Submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, which prompted the Special Rapporteur to visit Lowndes County in Alabama during his U.S. country mission
- Inga T. Winkler and Catherine Flowers, 'America's Dirty Secret': The Human Right to Sanitation in Alabama's Blackbelt, Columbia Human Rights Law Review 2017
- Inga Winkler, The Human Right to Sanitation, University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 2016
