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Dealing with the current flow of migrants flocking to the shores of southern European countries remains high on the international agenda. At the end of 2016, 276,957 migrants were waiting in Libya to cross the sea. Many of them were subject to human rights violations and abuses such as arbitrary detention, torture, unlawful killings, sexual exploitation and even slavery (IOM, 2017). The international response has been, so far, insufficient and new ideas and practices are urgently needed. After providing an overview of the legal framework and of the efforts carried out by the relevant international and regional organizations, this article focuses on recent treaties concluded between Italy and Libya, and argues that the new bilateral agreements represent an example of how States are responding to this challenge in an attempt to strike a balance between the need to strengthen the protection of migrants’ rights and the necessity to guarantee the security of national borders.

Natural and technological disasters have the potential to severely undermine the capacity of States to comply with their human rights obligations. Among the most vital rights of disaster victims are the rights to food and water, encapsulated in the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In this article, the scope of State obligations under international human rights law to secure sufficient amounts of adequate food and water in disaster settings is explored. After assessing if and to what extent the exercise of such rights can be restricted in the wake of a major disaster, the focus of the analysis shifts to the core content of State obligations, which are explored in the light of commonly accepted humanitarian standards. Lastly, the relationship between the obligation to ensure access to a minimum essential amount of food and water and the non-derogable right to life is examined.

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.