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…)