Non-state Actors, State-Centrism and Human Rights Obligations

Abstract

Despite its not being an entirely new debate in international law and international relations, the nexus between human rights and non-state actors has become a highly relevant topic of scholarly research, as witnessed by the three works under review, published in 2005 and 2006. When Andrew Clapham published in 1993 Human Rights in the Private Sphere, in which he already questioned the public/private divide of human rights law, the book was then categorized as both ‘adventuresome and timely’. Some fifteen years later, an analysis of this topic can no longer be called ‘adventuresome’, but the timeliness remains beyond doubt.