Water resource between sustainable consumption and sustainable development: Latin America legal models and perspectives of European Law

It is increasingly clear that water as a natural resource can no longer be regarded as a possession or commodity, leased, sold, left unused or destroyed in the framework of choices related to state sovereign powers. There is a need to limit the power of the national legal system, making the supranational law perspective of the water asset more incisive, in a comprehensive approach aiming to bind the European experience with that of other legal systems, where water-themed ideas of considerable interest have emerged. For the European jurist the Latin-American legal experience can play a special role, since its implementation of international legal standards and its turn of new bio-centric constitutionalism influenced the duty of care towards water asset and the restoration of its integrity. Meanwhile the Latin-American Water Tribunal is breaking the trend of legal monism and changing the dangerous State-centered, legalistic vision of water as a lucrative or productive good of the prerogative of the State, rather than as common good shared (commons) among men or as an ethically and socially oriented asset belonging to all people. This article emphasizes the importance of Euro-Latin American dialogue in order to found water law on a new basis.