Water rights are an increasingly contentious issue for everyone, and particularly so for indigenous communities whose customary use of water is neither legally recognized nore practically respected.  Water rights have as much to do with water quality as water quantity, and the quality issues quickly bring us into the realms of health, and back to human rights. 

WALIR Project.  The project on Water Law and Indigenous Rights (WALIR), managed by Wageningen University (Netherlands) in cooperation with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (UN-ECLAC) is addressing water rights issues in the Andean region of South America.  While the issues are regionally focuses, they have universal relevance to indigenous peoples everywhere.  The very comprehensive website is a repository for the many scholarly as well as practical papers that have been produced by the project. 

International Workshop on African Water Laws  This workshop, which is sub-titled Plural Legislative Frameworks for Rural Water Management in Africa, was held in January 2005 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and resulted in numerous papers which are available for download from the workshop website.  Only a few of the papers deal specifically with indigenous peoples, but most of the papers deal in some way with the interplay between traditional customary laws and imposed (European) legal systems.