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In the past decades, scholars and courts have paid considerable attention to the extraterritorial applicability of human rights treaties. By contrast, the extraterritorial application of constitutional rights has received comparable scholarly attention only in the United States. Specifically, there is a paucity of comparative research in this area, which contributes to the prevailing view that human rights law provides the proper framework under which domestic courts should examine extraterritoriality questions under constitutional law.
This article argues that domestic constitutional regimes and their judicial enforcers can and should provide an important counterweight to the deadlocked extraterritoriality debate at the international level. Using two case studies from Germany and the United States, it shows that domestic constitutional courts are sometimes better suited than treaty bodies to guard the normative values of human dignity and universality in an extraterritoriality context. This is most apparent in the case of Germany, which has a long tradition of integration into international multi-level governance systems and "bottom-up" resistance based on fundamental rights within such systems. Recent cases from the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) about the extraterritorial application of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) to foreign intelligence gathering and climate change support this theory. However, an independent constitutional approach can also achieve some normative effects in domestic systems that are more isolated from the international human rights system. Thus, the US Supreme Court likewise used domestic constitutional doctrine to sidestep the American government's strictly territorial interpretation of the ICCPR and employ a functional approach to the extraterritorial applicability of fundamental rights in the case of detention of suspected terrorists in the Guantánamo Bay naval base.
The study of these two examples does not purport to be comprehensive or even representative of the world’s diverse array of constitutions and their relationships with international human rights law. However, the independent power of constitutional frameworks in these two disparate cases should all the more provide an impetus for increased comparative research into constitutional extraterritoriality regimes and their value for the project of human rights.
Thus far, research into reservations to treaties has often overlooked reservations formulated to both European Social Charters (and its Protocols) and the relevant European Committee of Social Rights practices. There are several pressing reasons to further explore this gap in existing literature. First, an analysis of practices within the European Social Charters (and Protocols) will provide a fuller picture of the reservations and responses of treaty bodies. Second, in the context of previous landmark events it is worth noting the practices of another human rights treaty monitoring body that is often omitted from analyses. Third, the very fact that the formulation of reservations to treaties gives parties such far-reaching flexibility to shape their contractual obligations (à la carte) is surprising. An important outcome of the research is the finding that, despite the far-reaching flexibility present in the treaties analysed, both the States Parties and the European Committee of Social Rights generally treat them as conventional treaties to which the general rules on reservations apply. Consequently, there is no basis for assuming that the mere fact of adopting the à la carte system in a treaty with no reservation clause implies a formal prohibition of reservations or otherwise discourages their formulation.
This chapter consists of three parts. In the first part, I will give a short overview about the integration of the protection of the environment into German constitutional law. This section will start with the presentation of the relevant provision, Art. 20a BL. Then, I will elaborate on its legal character. In the second part, I will make some brief remarks on the practical implications of Art. 20a BL. Finally, I will present some preliminary conclusions.
Back in 1949, and thus only one year after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the four Geneva Conventions were adopted, providing a strong signal for a new world order created after 1945 with the United Nations at their centre and combining as their goals both the maintenance of peace and security and the protection of human rights, but also recognising, realistically, that succeeding generations had so far not yet been saved from the scourge of war. Hence, the continued need for rules governing, and limiting, the means and methods of warfare once an armed conflict has erupted. At the same time, the international community has unfortunately not been able so far to fully safeguard individual human rights, its efforts to that effect and the continuous development of international human rights law over the years notwithstanding.
The right to privacy in the digital age generates new challenges for the international jurisdiction. The following article deals with such challenges. Therefore it firstly defines the term of privacy in general and presents an international legal framework. With whisteblower Snowden a huge political discourse was initiated and the article gives insights into its further development. In 2015 the Human Rights Council for the first time announced a special rapporteur on the right to privacy. However, the discourse is not only taking place on a political level, also civil society organizations advocate more stringent regulations and prosecutions against violations of the right to privacy. Moreover the importance of the technology sector becomes clear. Companies like Microsoft are increasingly taking responsibility to protect digital media against unjustified data misuse, surveillance, collection and storage. But whereas the IT sector is developing very quickly, legislative processes do so rather slowly. Lastly, the individual is also hold to account. To protect oneself against data misuse is to a great extent acting self-responsible. Still, therefore information on protection must be clear and accessible for everyone.
This volume discusses the impact of human rights law on other fields of international law. Does international human rights law modify other fields of international law? Contributions focus on possible spillover effects of human rights on international economic or international criminal law. Does international human rights law have a streamlining effect on international law as a whole? This might be identified as a process of constitutionalisation. In this book, human rights can be understood as one of the core principles of international legal order and thus have an effect on the general law of treaties or on the settlement of disputes.
Although human rights law is a relatively young field of international law, its content and core values today are of major importance for the interpretation of international law as a whole. As we witness a redefinition of sovereignty as a responsibility of states towards the people and a shift to greater relevance of the individual in international law in general, it is a logical consequence that human rights have an impact on other areas of international law.
Inhalt: - Kurzzusammenfassung - I. Introduction - II. Current challenges to the United Nations Human Rights Programme - III. The Secretary General’s Reform report “In larger Freedom” and its impact for the human rights programme - IV. The High Commissioner’s Plan of Action of May 2005 - V. Negotiations on the establishment of the Human Rights Council and first Council activities - VI. Reform of the treaty body system and debates over the creation of a unified standing treaty body
Content: I. The nature and form of international law 1. The acceptance of the existence of an international legal order 2. The legal position of the individual in international law II. Obligations of states in the protection of international human rights 1. Treaty-based human rights obligations 2. The nature of treaty-based human rights obligations 3. The ”absolute” and ”objective” character of human rights treaty obligations 4. Human rights conventions as self-contained regimes 5. The problem of characterisation of human rights obligations of states III. Human rights obligations arising from general principles of international law 1. Obligations erga omnes and human rights norms 2. The outlawing of genocide as obligation erga omnes 3. Protection from slavery as obligation erga omnes 4. The outlawing of acts of aggression as obligation erga omnes 5. Protection from racial discrimination as obligation erga omnes 6. The basic rights of the human person as obligation erga omnes 7. Jus Cogens and the search for peremptory norms of human rights 8. International crimes and human rights norms 9. The relationship between the concepts: erga omnes, jus cogens, international crime and human rights IV. International instruments for the coercive enforcement of state obligations to ‘respect and ensure’ human rights 1. Countermeasures as consequences of breach of treaties in international law 2. Application of reprisals for the enforcement of treaty-based human rights obligations 3. Intervention for the protection of human rights in international law 4. Intervention by the Security Council for the protection of human rights: the situation before the East-West détente 5. Humanitarian intervention after the end of the Cold War 6. The legal nature of ECOWAS intervention in the Liberian Civil War 7. The legality of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo 8. Some instances of intervention with mixed motives V. Non-forceful measures for the enforcement of states’ human rights obligations 1. Economic and financial pressure as means of enforcing states’ obligation to respect and observe human rights 2. The application of the clausula rebus sic stantibus for the protection of human rights 3. The enforcement of human rights through the World Bank 4. The enforcement of human rights through the ILO 5. Diplomatic recognition as an instrument for securing a state's respect and promotion of human rights 6. Refusal to comply with an extradition agreement as a means of enforcing a state’s human rights obligations 7. Denial of immunity as a means of enforcing a state’s human rights obligations 8. Publicity as an instrument for the enforcement of human rights VI. Judicial enforcement of state obligations to ‘respect and ensure’ human rights 1. Enforcement of human rights through International Criminal Tribunals 2. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia 3. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 4. The International Special Court of Sierra Leone Résumé