Surrounded by a frenzy of cameras, Detroit resident Rochelle McCaskill explained her predicament to a team of United Nations officials on Sunday: The numbers simply didn’t add up.

Out of her $672 monthly disability check, McCaskill spends $600 rent, she said, leaving her unable to pay the city’s water bills, which have skyrocketed to more than twice the national average.

“They need a category for those of us who cannot pay,” said McCaskill, whose water was shut off this summer as part of a wave of disconnections that, block by block, have left thousands of city residents without running water.

The city turned off McCaskill’s water despite the fact that she had been paying down her $540.10 water bill in increments and that she suffers from MRSA, a contagious infection that the NIH considers a “serious public health concern” and requires frequent bathing.

“It makes you feel like a failure in your own home,” she said, as she described washing and brushing her teeth with buckets of water delivered by the community group We the People of Detroit, part of the People’s Water Board Coalition.

McCaskill was one of dozens of residents, teachers, water department employees and parents who testified to two U.N. officials, who expressed concern that the shutoffs threatened residents’ human right to water and, in a city where the population is more than 80 percent African-American, could constitute discrimination under international law.

“We were shocked, impressed by the proportions of the disconnections and by the way that it is affecting the weakest, the poorest and the most vulnerable,” said Catarina de Albuquerque, the U.N. special rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, at a press conference on Monday.

“I’ve been to rich countries like Japan and Slovenia where basically 99 percent of population have access to water, and I’ve been to poor countries where half the population doesn’t have access to water … but this large-scale retrogression or backwards steps is new for me.” She added, “From a human rights perspective, any retrogression should be seen as a human right violation.”

On Oct. 18, de Albuquerque and Leilani Farha, U.N. special rapporteur on adequate housing, arrived in Detroit to conduct an informal fact-finding mission into the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s water shut-offs. The city has disconnected water from at least 27,000 households this year, with as many as 10,000 households currently without running water. Hundreds of thousands of additional households are at risk of having their tap cut.

In response, lawyers filed Lyda v. City of Detroit on behalf of residents who have had their water severed. But in late September, Detroit’s bankruptcy judge ruled that, although “water is a necessary ingredient to sustaining life,” residents nevertheless have no “enforceable right” to water and that the city needed the revenue.

That’s where the United Nations comes in.

“Disconnection of water services because of failure to pay due to lack of means constitutes a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights,” U.N. officials de Albuquerque and Farha wrote in advance of their arrival.