28 February 2013
The SHARES Project is closely following and collecting news items that are linked to the issue of shared responsibility (see: www.sharesproject.nl/news). Here is our ‘SHARES News Items Overview: 16-28 February 2013’ consisting of a summary of recent news relating to shared responsibility. (more…)
25 February 2013
The extraterritorial applicability of human rights obligations is still a hotly debated topic. As most human rights treaties contain a jurisdiction clause which limits their effect to territories or people over which a state has some form of authority or control, the discussion tends to focus on the proper interpretation of the term jurisdiction. Courts and supervisory bodies confronted with interpreting the outer limits of jurisdiction clauses, for instance pertaining to situations of foreign occupation or arrests conducted by state agents abroad, have conceded that jurisdiction does not mean that a state’s human rights obligations end at its borders. The question that remains is when states are required to secure human rights for people outside their borders and to what extent.
Until recently, most of the discussion focused on instruments which by and large contain civil and political rights (CP rights). This can perhaps be explained by the simple fact that these instruments have explicit jurisdiction clauses and, quite importantly, also have international supervisory bodies competent to decide on (individual) complaints, thus creating a body of case-law on the subject. Therefore, a lacuna was filled when in 2011 a group of experts adopted the Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations in the Area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. (more…)
15 February 2013
The SHARES Project is closely following and collecting news items that are linked to the issue of shared responsibility (see: www.sharesproject.nl/news). Here is our third ‘SHARES News Items Overview’, a new category of blog posts consisting of a summary of recent news relating to shared responsibility. (more…)
13 February 2013
Cross-posted on EJIL:Talk!
UN targeted sanctions, especially those related to terrorism, have had their fair share of the limelight lately, particularly in view of important decisions by the ECJ, the ECtHR, the UK Supreme Court and others in cases such as Kadi, Nada, and Ahmed. Here, I try to look at this jurisprudence through the lens of the project on shared responsibility (SHARES). After introducing the relevant sanctions regime, I argue that the complex conduct of the UN and its member-states in designing, imposing, and implementing the sanctions leads to them sharing international responsibility for the resulting breach of aspects of the internationally protected right to a fair trial. This is so because states are ‘held responsible’ in their own domestic courts or in regional international courts, which then forces them to turn to the UN and seek to implement the organisation’s international responsibility. In this manner, the international responsibility for what is in effect ‘shared’ conduct is itself shared, in practice. (more…)
31 January 2013
The SHARES Project has been closely following and collecting news items that are linked to the issue of shared responsibility (see: www.sharesproject.nl/news). We hereby introduce our second ‘SHARES News Items Overview’, a new category of blog posts consisting of a summary of recent news relating to shared responsibility. (more…)