Is Ethiopia’s GERD in breach of international law? | Fadi Farhat

Is Ethiopia’s GERD in breach of international law? | Fadi Farhat

Egypt is warning that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), if filled with water from the Blue Nile, will mean that 150 million people in Egypt and Sudan face a dire future. To Egypt, the $4.6 billion hydroelectric dam, the largest in Africa and whose reservoir alone is the size of Greater London, imposes an existential threat to its water security and welfare.

Egypt has implored the UN Security Council to intervene with the proviso that a lack of intervention could lead to a conflict.

Whether the GERD is illegal under international law and how the Nile's waters should be shared remains a moot point.

At the heart of the legal wrangling (if not the diplomatic one), Egypt would point to a 1902 treaty between the United Kingdom and Ethiopia in which the latter purports to disclaim any right to the Nile and agrees not to take any measures that would reduce the availability of the Nile's water resources to Egypt as evidence that Ethiopia cannot and should not build the dam.  Since Egypt was a British Protectorate at the time of the treaty, Egypt essentially would argue that it is a third-party beneficiary of the treaty.

However, the potential difficulty with that argument is the