In the panoply of human rights, it isn’t the first to trip off the tongue. But more than 150 delegates at an international conference on Wednesday urged that it should be.
The world toilet summit began in Beijing with experts demanding that access to and cleanliness of public loos should be a basic human right.
The annual summit brings together scholars, environmentalists and toilet company executives to raise awareness of global trends affecting their use and abuse.
According to the organisers, the toilet topic is one of the world’s last great taboos — on a par with sex, which gave rise to the sexual revolution in the 1960s, women’s rights, which led to women’s liberation in the 70s and reappraisals of stigmatised diseases such as leprosy and Aids in the 80s and 90s.
”People are saying ‘We want good toilets!’ because toilets are a basic human right and that basic human right has been neglected,” said Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organisation, a co-sponsor of the summit. ”The world deserves better toilets.”
The WC movement could hardly have chosen a more fitting venue. Few countries have more room for improvement than the summit host, China, which acknowledged at the start of the three-day event that 60% of foreign visitors are unhappy with local loos.
But Beijing is keen to show that it is cleaning up its act ahead of the 2008 Olympics. In the past three years the city has spent 238-million yuan ($31-million) on building or refitting 747 washrooms at tourist spots.
It has also introduced a grading system that ranks public toilets like hotels. Municipal officials boast that Beijing can now offer 88 four-star loos with remote-sensor flushing, automatic hand dryers and even piped music.
But at the bottom of the new toilet class system, millions of people still have to share public facilities so foetid that they could hardly fail to agitate even the most politically placid user. – Guardian Unlimited Â