SHARES blog
20 December 2013
© Getty Images, BBC
Much has been said and done in recent decades to explore and exploit extraterritorial applicability of human rights. Whether in court cases or scholarly works, the debate has usually revolved around the concept of “jurisdiction”, as used in human rights treaties to demarcate their applicability. Jurisdiction, first and foremost, functions as a threshold for applicability of human rights treaties. Many opinions have been heard on the criteria that should be met before a state has jurisdiction and whether jurisdiction should form a high or low threshold. Without wanting to dwell on this issue too much, suffice it to say that international legal discourse has moved towards an understanding of jurisdiction as based on factual control exercised by a state over people. As explained by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the 2011 Al-Skeini case this factual control can either be exercised in the form of effective control over territory or in the form of authority and control over people. In this blog, I submit that an important function of jurisdiction that is yet to be further explored is its role in the allocation of human rights obligations. (more…)
16 December 2013
This is our News Items Overview of 16 November-15 December 2013, a summary of recent news relating to shared responsibility. (more…)
4 December 2013
In the aftermath of a disaster, affected States need to address its material consequences. For this purpose, aid is normally forthcoming from other States, international organizations and Non-Governmental Organizations. In practice, however, this foreign aid is not always accepted. And even if external assistance is agreed to, as the Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) put it in 2000: ‘There is no definitive, broadly accepted source of international law which spells out legal standards, procedures, rights and duties pertaining to disaster response and assistance. No systematic attempt has been made to put together the disparate threads of existing law, to formalize customary law or to expand and develop the law in new ways.’
In this ‘yawning gap’, as the IFRC labeled it, stepped the International Law Commission (ILC or Commision) in 2006 when, in fulfillment of its Charter and Statute mandate and on the proposal of the United Nations (UN) Secretariat it included the topic ‘Protection of persons in the event of disasters’ in its program of work. (more…)
15 November 2013
This is our News Items Overview of 16 October-15 November 2013, a summary of recent news relating to shared responsibility. (more…)
3 November 2013
In this blogpost I reflect, from a shared responsibility perspective, on two issues arising under the draft EU-ECHR Accession Agreement: (1) the question of to whom EU member states’ acts implementing EU law are attributed, and why; (2) the intervening role reserved for the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in proceedings brought before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The relevant provisions in the draft Accession Agreement are Art. 1(3), respectively Art. 3(6).
1. Issues of attribution
The draft Accession Agreement makes it clear that the attribution of responsibility may be a function of the relevant primary norms of international law, and their scope (the ECHR norms in the case) rather than of secondary rules that are applicable across-the-board. Questions of shared/exclusive responsibility are then conceived of differently with respect to the ECHR than, say, the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the former case, acts of EU member states implementing EU law are attributed to the member state rather than to the EU, whereas in the latter, such acts are attributed to the EU, the member states being mere agents or organs. (more…)
