Human Rights as a Common Interest of the International Community under the Law of International Responsibility

Abstract

Human rights are playing an increasingly important role in the functioning and development of society, and the international legal regulation of the sphere of inter-State cooperation on human rights has acquired a number of specific features that have a significant impact on the development of various institutions of international law, including the law of international responsibility. The purpose of the article is to analyze the features and problems of implementation of the methodology of ensuring the common interest of the international community as a whole that includes protection of human rights under the law of international responsibility. The author considers the category “common interests of the international community as a whole,” and explores its importance in the process of intensification of interstate cooperation in the field of human rights. It is noted that such instruments of ensuring the implementation of the common interests of the international community as a whole as norms of jus cogens and obligations erga omnes predetermine the specifics of the content of the secondary rules of the law of international responsibility. These include rules establishing circumstances precluding the wrongfulness of an act, establishing the consequences of serious breaches of obligations arising from peremptory norms of international law governing the invocation of responsibility by a State other than an injured State. The author emphasizes the significance of the instruments under consideration in the process of establishing the features of the content of individual constructions of the law of international responsibility. Attention is drawn to the fact that implementation of the common interest of the international community as a whole ensuring promotion and protection of human rights in the law of international responsibility entails some difficulties arising due to the lack, inter alia, of consensus concerning methodology for classifying international law as jus cogens norms and the existence of different approaches to understanding the content and structure of human rights per se. It is concluded that, despite the existence of these problems, it is impossible to deny the significant influence of norms of jus cogens and obligations erga omnes on the content of international legal regulation of various areas of international cooperation in the context of the growing trend towards the communitarization of international law and humanization of international relations.