The next question is what it is that needs

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Extraterritorial human rights obligations are contentious. In the UK, for example, the ECtHR’s findings that armed forces deployed abroad have human rights obligations have met with criticism. Extraterritoriality is also routinely named as one of the most difficult aspects of the next generation of potentially groundbreaking human rights litigation: climate cases. In general, governments struggle to accept that the human rights of distant strangers are really for them to worry about. The intuition seems to be that it is not their burden to carry and that they certainly do not need to explain to a human rights body why this is so. This attitude says something about two reasons why it is important to justify such obligations. One of these reasons is a normative one: obligations, and particularly stringent obligations such as the ones flowing from human rights, are burdensome and so raise questions of fairness. Whenever there are demands for them to be allocated and discharged justification is required. The second reason is prudential and concerns institutions interpreting and phone number list enforcing international human rights law – principally regional courts and UN human rights bodies. Their legitimacy is important to carry out their task (on the ECtHR specifically see, eg, here). And this legitimacy is undermined whenever the reasoning is not principled (see, eg, here and here). Explicitly invoking tools related to justification has the potential to make reasoning (more) principled. It is thus important to international human rights law as a system of accountability.

to be justified. Human rights are claims of individuals (and sometimes groups) on the actions of an actor other than the rights-holder, usually to do something for the right holder’s sake, regardless of whether it benefits the actor who is called upon to act. This means that, principally, two aspects of an obligation need to be justified: what is to be done and who needs to do it. The question of what needs to be done concerns the content of human rights obligations. The question of who needs to fulfill that obligation can also be called the question of allocation – particularly as regards positive extraterritorial obligations, which may well rise to prominence in the adjudication of climate cases in particular. The focus of this post is this question of extraterritoriality as allocation.