Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations of Local Government

Leiden Journal of International Law, 2012

The extraterritoriality or extraterritorial application of international and European human rights treaties refers to the recognition by those treaties' states parties of the international and European human rights of individuals or groups of individuals situated outside their territory and, in a second stage, to the identification of their corresponding duties to those individuals. Examples of extraterritoriality abound in international human rights practice, and in particular in the European Court of Human Rights’ case law. Except for vague and often misleading gestures to the universality of human rights, which allegedly requires their extraterritorial application, however, many of the normative considerations underlying the extraterritorial applicability of human rights have not been broached in the human rights law literature. Nor, conversely, have human rights theorists, even among those who take the supply side of human rights seriously, devoted much attention to the thre...

Extraterritorial application of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, paper by A.A. Ivanova, Belarusian State University, Minsk., 2019

The paper focuses on the specificity of extraterritorial applicability of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It states that throughout practice of judicial and quasi-judicial bodies extraterritorial application of the Covenant is expanding, depending on the special character of power over the enjoyment of human rights, which is exercised by State Parties outside national territory. This expansion is clearly shown in the paper, giving a coherent view on the issue and determining key problem areas.

Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, 2020

Local governments around the world have been engaging with international law and policy at an exponential intensity, with prominent engagement in climate change, migration and more recently human rights. This engagement cannot be adequately understood within the terms and framework of positive international law alone. This contribution aims to map and create a grounded typology of local government engagement with human rights, encompassing both activities within their localities and outside-at national, international or transnational scales. The article introduces local governments' engagement in the Formation of Human Rights, Implementation of Human Rights, Defence of Human Rights, Coordination of Human Rights, Dissemination of Human Rights and the Contestation of Human Rights as empirical ideal types that have emerged from data through grounded theory. Analysing this engagement from the perspectives of both positive international law as well as legal pluralism, with specific focus on the New Haven School of Law, the article argues that local governments are now at the core of a newly formed norm-generating community. Local governments engage with local and international actors and processes both within the rules of inclusion of contemporary international law-making-seeking to expand these norms to include local governments themselves-but they also contest and challenge the very rules of the game in the first place, and resort to creating ''human rights in the city'' as a body of norms parallel to international human rights law. Whether we accept a pluralist understanding of international law to include local governments and their human rights engagement, or whether we consider these developments to be outside international law, forming a parallel normative order in the legal pluralist sense, local government engagement with human rights has already succeeded in reaching and influencing many established international actors and has already infiltrated recent instruments of positive international law.

Fordham Urban Law Journal, 2010

Fordham Int'l LJ, 1994

Since the end of World War II, the international community has witnessed a revolutionary codification of international norms in the field of human rights. Dozens of treaties, conventions, resolutions, and proclamations have come into legal force through the various bodies of ...

Human Rights and International Legal Discourse, 2019

The obligation to protect individuals against human rights abuses by private and other ‘third’ parties is an accepted part of the tripartite human rights obligations’ classification. Ways of complying with this obligation are, however, not always clear, and some opposition has been voiced to it having reach beyond a state’s territorial border. This opposition is largely based on the reluctance of states to exercise their jurisdiction outside their territory. In this article, we address the content and reach of the human rights obligation to protect and how this relates to the exercise of jurisdiction to prevent human rights violations committed by private entities both within and beyond their home state’s territory. While the obligation to protect generally relates to the state’s obligation to regulate the conduct of any non-state actor, in this article we will use business enterprises as the actors in focus. The obligation to protect does not per se have a territorial limitation. The territorial limitation is brought in when the question of jurisdiction is added to the complexity. By addressing prescriptive jurisdiction, the article challenges the notion that jurisdiction in international human rights law is almost exclusively territorial, and argues that this is a misconception which results in many abuses of human rights that could have been addressed through regulation of conduct beyond a state’s border. Not tackling this misconception results in such conduct now being carried out with impunity. Consequently, the article argues that a restricted approach to jurisdiction is a barrier to full compliance with human rights obligations and questions whether this narrow approach is necessary and in line with other areas of regulation through international treaties.

The Routledge Handbook on Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations, 2021

Research Handbook on International Human Rights Law

2021

Regional human rights mechanism are now in place covering nearly all five continents with the notable exception of Australia. Regional and international human rights protection are not meant to thwart each other. On the contrary, the regional protection of human rights is intended to back up and strengthen the international one by translating human rights into local languages and supporting them with additional protective mechanisms like commissions and courts that enforce regional human rights documents. In this volume, five experts from various continents will introduce regional human rights protection systems in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and Australia providing an overview of the regional protections vis-a-vis the international one and then contextualising it in specific country context.

2014

a-response-to-milanovic/ (noting the increase in states' "ability to project power at a distance, and to move people to distant places" as well as conflicts that that seem "to bleed over to many discrete locations that are neither subject to pervasive armed conflict nor are belligerently occupied"; all of which make "the extraterritorial application questions far harder, but also far more pertinent."). 3 The issue of the extraterritorial application of human rights law can also arise in connection with states' policies and conduct in the realms of immigration, trade, development, participation in international organizations, national security outside of any armed conflict, peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations, foreign intelligence, and law enforcement. 4 Article 2, Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Civilian Persons in Time of War ("GC IV") (August 12, 1949), T.I.A.S. 3365. 5 Sarah Cleveland, A Response to Milanovic, OPINIOJURIS, . 6 A number of competing paradigms govern the question of when IHL displaces, or must be harmonized with, other potentially applicable bodies of law, including human rights law and domestic law. For background see Charles P. Trumbull, Filling the "Gaps" in the Law Applicable to Non-International Armed Conflicts, INTERCROSS, question of the extraterritorial application of human rights law must be resolved before it can be determined which human rights obligations apply alongside any applicable IHL rules. This article aims to focus on this antecedent question. As domestic courts, international tribunals, and human rights treaty bodies increasingly confront fact patterns and claims requiring a consideration of whether a particular human rights obligation applies extraterritorially, they have struggled to create a defensible and coherent framework of analysis. This process of doctrinal development and evolution has been decentralized to a certain degree since the various human rights instruments contain slightly different formulations for their scope of application, and there is no appellate body to harmonize the law. Nonetheless, through a process of cross-fertilization and parallel reasoning, a doctrinal convergence is now discernable within the opinions and other views of authoritative decision-makers representing the range of human rights treaty bodies and tribunals that have confronted the issue. According to this consensus, states owe human rights obligations to all individuals within the authority, power, and control of their agents or instrumentalities and can be found responsible whenever they cause harm to such individuals. In terms of which rights and obligations apply extraterritorially, human rights bodies are increasingly adopting a calibrated approach that hinges on the nature of the right, the degree of control the state exercises over the territory, individuals, or transaction in question. Starting in 1995, but more consistently during the Bush Administration, the United States has in its filings before these human rights bodies 7 advanced a categorical and contrarian position that the obligations contained in the relevant human rights instruments have no extraterritorial application. 8 This unqualified position is increasingly out-of-step with the established ;