Human rights law and Disaster risk reduction

The purpose of the article is to highlight the scope of the overlap between existing commitments in the area of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and legal obligations prevailing under International Human Rights Law. It initially describes the emergence of DRR as a discrete area of disaster management and brings to the fore some of the commitments that States have undertaken by negotiating and adhering to the DRR framework. These commitments are then compared to the practice and case law of universal and regional human rights treaty monitoring bodies that have addressed alleged violations of human rights connected to natural or human-made disasters.The concluding paragraph briefly reviews the similarities between the political obligations contained in the most recent DRR instruments and the legal obligations imposed on States by the human rights instruments they have signed and ratified.