The Challenges to the Emergency Medical Services to be Recognised as a Human Right in International Human Rights Law

It is a joy and a privilege for me to be here with you allfriends and colleagues of very long standing and new (dare I say "younger"?)colleagues with whom I look forward to forming lifelong friendships.**[Much of the depressing material that we have been discussing has to do not with substance, but with procedurewho can gain access to the courts or legislatures, what statutory or regulatory language will be held to be enforceable at the instance of private plaintiffs, etc.***Although this is not what I am going to discuss, I do want to underscore that access to the courts and legislatures is crucial.I never understand why so-called conservatives want to keep people out of these institutions, for when aggrieved people do not have such access, they are more likely to express their grievances in other ways, often including violence.

The Nuremberg tribunal was the expression and the beginning of states' recognition of their duty to prosecute genocide and other gross human rights violations. It was a first step towards fulfillin...

Human rights queryfalse are typically presented in terms of entitlements, correlative duties, claims, “trumps,” and remedies. 1 These framings, which draw principally on law and philosophy, emphasi...

Regional human rights courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the African Court of Human and People's Rights (ACtHPR) have become popular sites of mobilization for victims and activists who seek justice when justice fails at home. Besides being platforms for individual remedy, human rights courts increasingly shape social norms and state policy within countries, making them attractive avenues for rights advocates to develop new norms or to push domestic authorities to reform legislation. The judges of these courts can decide, for example, whether same-sex couples have a right to be married, if prisoners have the right to vote or receive HIV/AIDS treatment, or when a state can deport illegal immigrants to a country where they will likely be tortured. As these courts pass their judgments, they often find themselves in conflict with states that are violating human rights of marginalized groups on a large scale and are unwilling to implement international rulings. Although international human rights courts have become increasingly popular venues among victims and activists who seek justice when justice fails at home, we are only beginning to understand how activists play roles in shaping the development of regional human rights courts' case law—the body of judgments that shapes how judges will make their decisions in the future. We now have plenty of international relations and international legal research on the interactions between states and international courts: how judges in these courts wrestle between deferring to the interests of member state governments whose actions are on trial and sticking closely to the conventions' fundamental yet evolving principles (Alter et al., 2019; Helfer & Voeten, 2014). As some states begin to resist international courts' authority, scholars have begun to examine the dynamics of this backlash (Hillebrecht, 2022; Madsen et al., 2018; Sandholtz et al., 2018). Recent studies have also demonstrated that human rights advocates—whether NGOs or individual lawyers—have a significant impact on shaping the jurisprudence of international courts and the impact judgments have in concrete locations (Kahraman, 2018; Sundstrom, 2014; van der Vet, 2012; Kurban, 2020; Conant, 2018; Harms, 2021; Cichowski, 2016; Hodson, 2011; Haddad, 2018). Meanwhile, these advocates themselves have been subject to repression and stigmatization by governments as part of the backlash phenomenon. Without an adequate understanding of the factors shaping activists' engagement with international courts, we risk undervaluing their strategic impact on the expansion of case law, the human rights protection of marginalized groups who cannot find remedies at home, and the domestic implementation of these judgments in an age of state backlash. In this section, we summarize the three papers contained in this symposium and their original contributions to these themes. Over the last decade, dozens of countries have erected legal barriers or started vilifying campaigns to stymie the work of NGOs (Buyse, 2018; Chaudhry, 2022). One tactic in this toolkit is the enactment of burdensome regulation on NGOs that receive funds from foreign donors as they allegedly promote foreign agendas (Christensen & Weinstein, 2013; Dupuy et al., 2021). States that frequently abuse human rights are especially prone to target NGOs that engage in strategic litigation (Hillebrecht, 2019). Most NGOs depend on foreign funding, and NGOs that litigate international cases fall disproportionately in this category, but do funders affect the selection of cases? In “Foreign Agents or Agents of Justice? Private Foundations, NGO Backlash, and International Human Rights Litigation,” Heidi Haddad and Lisa Sundstrom examine the extent to which Western donors, particularly private foundations, have encouraged NGOs in Europe to litigate at the ECtHR as a human rights advocacy strategy. They examine overall patterns of donor funding and NGO litigation records, and look in more detail at the case of Russian NGOs' foreign funding and litigation records. The analysis is extremely timely, as the Russian government's criminalization of independent civil society actors, especially in the human rights field, and their accusation that foreign funding turns NGOs into “foreign agents” have been crucial elements of the Russian regime's autocratization. This claim has also provided fuel for Russia's disenchantment with the ECtHR in recent years, contributing to the assessment of many observers that Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine was the last straw in an inevitable collision course leading to its exit from the Council of Europe. Haddad and Sundstrom debunk the idea that foreign donors are pushing NGOs toward strategies of human rights litigation. Instead, they argue, there is more evidence that NGOs themselves promoted the mechanism of international litigation as a strategy that donors later adopted. This article is a poignant reminder of the advocacy tools that Russian human rights activists and citizens have lost as a result of their government's departure from the Council of Europe, including ECtHR jurisdiction. Yet it also provides insight into the likely roles of foreign donors in other country cases where NGOs are using international court litigation as a human rights advocacy strategy, which is often a target of the ire of national governments, as explored in the next article in the symposium. When states attack human rights NGOs within their borders and/or international human rights courts themselves, how does this affect the willingness of those NGOs to take cases to international courts, and the ways in which they do so? De Silva and Plagis ask this question in their article about state backlash against NGOs in the case of Tanzania and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. A fascinating empirical question they pose is: does state backlash against NGOs increase NGO litigation at international courts (to contest state repression at those courts and use international mechanisms when domestic ones are not available), roughly in line with Keck and Sikkink's famous “boomerang pattern” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998), or decrease it due to heightened fear and restricted NGO capabilities that state repression creates? Employing a process-tracing analysis of NGOs' involvement in three cases before the African Court at different stages of the Tanzanian government's backlash against the Court, De Silva and Plagis find that “two-level backlash” by states can result in both phenomena, either promoting or deterring NGO legal mobilization at international human rights courts, depending on certain conditions. The three selected cases concerning the death penalty, the rights of persons with albinism, and the rights of pregnant schoolgirls and mothers, which took place at different time periods, demonstrate a number of patterns of state backlash interacting with NGO strategies. The authors find that domestic-level state backlash deterred domestic NGOs from partnering with international NGOs in litigation, but that such backlash, when it repressed domestic political and legal mobilization opportunities, actually encouraged both Tanzanian and international NGOs to turn to the African Court more frequently to seek remedies. International-level backlash in turn only deterred NGOs from international litigation when such backlash consisted of state efforts to restrict NGOs' ability to engage in litigation, and not when the international backlash was in the form of routine noncompliance with African Court rulings. Importantly, the authors find that NGO responses to state backlash were significantly shaped by their degree of legal consciousness and expertise with the rules, proceedings, and workings of the African Court. Those NGOs with less knowledge and experience were more likely to back away from engaging with the Court under the pressure of state backlash. De Silva and Plagis conclude that “NGOs' persistent human rights advocacy in the face of state backlash is a double-edged sword,” in the sense that they may not be deterred by state backlash initially, but there is a danger that their continued determination to engage in international litigation could prompt governments to engage in even more severe forms of backlash, with critical impacts on international courts and already vulnerable human rights defenders. Rights advocates have a growing menu of institutions and courts available to them. How do activists choose at which institution to lodge their cases in a world where legal remedies have diversified, or as some have argued, fragmented (Koskenniemi & Leino, 2002)? In “What Makes an International Institution Work for Labor Activists? Shaping International Law through Strategic Litigation,” Filiz Kahraman goes beyond the tendency of legal mobilization studies to only examine how activists interact with a single court or institution. Instead, Kahraman opens up how rights advocates imagine which institution is most receptive to their claims. Drawing on a comparative interview study of British and Turkish trade union activists and their legal mobilization campaigns at international courts and quasi-judicial institutions like the International Labor Organization (ILO), Kahraman examines how activists first probe and then strategically identify which court or international institution is most susceptible to their primary goals of influencing structural reforms and setting new norms. Through this probing process—or dynamic signaling game between courts and litigants—activists push a court's jurisprudence and case law into new issue areas. For instance, at the ECtHR, Turkish trade unionists challenged domestic courts' ruling that public sector workers did not have the right to establish unions, even though the ECtHR had no established case law on labor rights in 1990s. They won the case, with the ECtHR finding that Turkey violated the right of public sector workers to unionize. These cases not only had an impact within Turkey, but over the next decades, similar cases brought by British unionists would spin off the early precedent set by the Turkish legal mobilization efforts. Kahraman argues that they ultimately pushed the ECtHR to recognize the basic trade union rights as fundamental human rights. Kahraman sheds light on the often hidden strategies behind international litigation. Activists litigate not just for the immediate impact on the current case they work on, but how they envision that all the cases they work on may shape norms and domestic structural reforms further in the future. Whether an institution is perceptive of claims lies in the eye of the beholder. Kahraman finds that besides targeting institutions with high compliance rates, they also take cases to institutions with low rates of compliance, especially “if these institutions have extensive judicial authority to create new international norms.” So, it is not the de jure protection set by an international courts, but rather how activists perceive the juridical responsiveness and judicial authority of courts—or, how judges adopt either an activist approach or restraint in response to incoming cases and how willing states are to implement cases of a court, respectively—that determines why activists select certain courts or quasi-judicial institutions (like the ILO). Kahraman gives us new tools to interpret how activists perceive authority and receptiveness and respond to opportunities. Rather than static external legal remedies, courts and quasi-judicial institutions are opportunity structures that are malleable to the strategic vision of the activist or litigant. The articles in this symposium together reveal a number of key overlapping insights. At the broadest level, they demonstrate that activists' behaviors and strategies influence international courts' jurisprudence, politics within states, and the human rights outcomes of everyday citizens—and these influences have often been hidden in our existing canon of research on international courts. In addition, all of these articles show that, while activists may face challenges in their efforts, often including significant backlash from their home state governments, they also continue to retain significant agency through their creative efforts to develop legal strategies and circumvent state repression. Activists perennially innovate: sparking the ideas that inspire donors who fund them; calculating how to continue their litigation work when government actors threaten them; and taking risks in litigation to push courts to expand how they define human rights. However, along with these uplifting conclusions, there are worrying patterns that demand future research. States are increasingly pushing back against the powers of international courts to bind them to costly measures, and as this symposium has shown, national governments often point to activists as contributors to this “problem” of invasive international human rights standards. A growing body of research has tracked how human rights defenders of all kinds globally are under threat from actors like governments and corporations who disagree with their contentious actions. We need more studies that gather comprehensive data and systematically track these threats, specifically with regard to activists who engage in international human rights litigation. We suspect that such activists are likely disproportionately targeted due to the international visibility of their complaints. We also desperately need research into possible innovative responses to these threats to activists—responses from activists, funders, governments of countries that support human rights, and international courts themselves. Freek van der Vet is a University Researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki and the principal investigator of the Toxic Crimes Project. Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. She is the director of the ActinCourts network at UBC and conducts research on legal mobilization by Russian activists.

Over the last decade, many scholars have argued for the enforcement of international human rights norms by the domestic courts. Those claims are largely normative and there are hardly any empirical arguments advanced in support of the normative arguments. This paper presents an empirical study which examines the enforcement of international human rights norms by the Indian Supreme Court between 1997 and 2008; based on the content analysis of its judicial decisions. With specific focus on the Indian Supreme Court, it examines the reasons, justifications and means for referral to international human rights norms between 1997 and 2008. Firstly, it examines the human rights cases in which the Supreme Court refers to international human rights norms. Then, human rights cases are divided into three categories; those involving: 1. Civil and political rights, 2. Economic, social and cultural Rights and 3. Both. Secondly, techniques developed by the Supreme Court of India for the enforcement of international human rights norms in these three categories of cases are explained. The methodology deployed codes the variables aimed at ascertaining the frequency of the enforcement of international human rights norms by the Supreme Court of India, using different techniques between 1997 and 2008. The study finds that the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence during the years 1997-2008 can be defined as a transitional period, at least when it comes to the enforcement of international human rights norms. The Court has used international human rights norms largely as an interpretative tool, where international human rights norms were taken as a ‘given’ under the international human rights instruments. There are only a few instances where the Court has ‘defined’ what constitute international human rights norms by reading them into customary international law.This paper concludes by suggesting that the Supreme Court of India should take an ‘active,’ informed approach, while referring to international human rights norms, and should enforce international human rights norms by reading them into customary international law where needed; rather than its ‘passive’ approach of referring to international human rights norms for statutory interpretations. The Supreme Court should look at the relationship between international and domestic legal norms as a “co-constitutive, or synergistic,” and should utilize these norms actively as a participant in the dynamic process of developing international law. The Supreme Court must be able to apply customary law on human rights exhaustively and in a fully independent way, in particular, it must be able to verify that the violations of human rights recognized by customary international law are not committed by the executive. While the Supreme Court has been known for its judicial activism, it is time that it is also known for its informed approach and respect towards international human rights norms.

Although collective cultural rights are included in international human rights law, their precise place and their nature and significance are not well-explored or understood. This paper aims to show where collective cultural rights can be found in international human rights law and explore how these rights fit in the general body and framework of international human rights law. The starting point in this chapter is international human rights law, which implies that the analysis of collective cultural rights is framed by positive law and international legal instruments, such as treaties and conventions, as well as by soft law instruments, such as declarations, recommendations and resolutions. In this paper, the two categories of collective rights and cultural rights are defined, drawing a distinction between a) different types of collective rights, including rights for collectivities as such, rights for individuals as members of collectivities, and rights with a collective interest or object; and b) between different types of cultural rights, including rights that explicitly refer to ‘culture’ and rights that relate to culture or have a cultural dimension. This paper furthermore analyses various contentious issues surrounding collective rights and cultural rights in international human rights law, including the lack of clarity on the object and subject of these rights. The paper then outlines the different forms of collective cultural rights in international human rights law, by providing examples of legal provisions in international human rights law that can be classified as collective cultural rights. Finally, the paper elaborates on how collective subjects and collective cultural interests are integrated in international human rights law and analyses how and to what extent collective cultural rights provisions provide answers to the above-noted issues.

Though Taiwan is not a member state of the United Nations, it is determined to incorporate some international human rights treaties in the same way a usual state does. In 2009, the Government made every effort to “ratify” the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women into the domestic legal system in accordance with the “treaty obligation.” Unsurprisingly, none of the instruments of ratification were successfully deposited with the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Two years later, the Government submitted its initial reports under the two Covenants to a group of ten international independent experts for review in Taiwan. In this connection, the Government and people of Taiwan have come to recognize that international human rights law constitutes an integral part of the legal system of Taiwan. With this recognition, the courts have occasionally applied or referred to the two Covenants in their decisions and judgments in spite of the doubts and criticism as to the validity of the international human rights treaties’ rules. Apparently, the determination to internalize international human rights law into the domestic legal system of Taiwan is beyond any doubt; however, several problems have emerged subsequent to the failure of completing the process of ratification under international law. The problems may be summarized as follows. First, the question concerning the capacity to conclude international treaties and the nature of the legal effect as regards the unilateral act by Taiwan in the context of international law. Second, the status and effect of international human rights treaties in the domestic legal order of Taiwan, Third, there are questions concerning the method of incorporating international human rights treaties by enacting the Implementing Act, which was specifically designed to create the binding force of the treaty law within the jurisdiction of Taiwan. Fourth, the practice applied by the courts or in constitutional interpretation as regards the rights and freedoms in the human rights treaties. Without proper theory and adequate practices concerning how to incorporate international human rights treaties in Taiwan, international human rights law is nothing but an unexpected and unwelcome international law that has caused an unpleasant disturbance in the domestic legal order. That said, this chapter intends to elucidate the legal implications of these questions and the problems therein and to deliberate a possible solution for the judiciary to take the rights and fundamental freedoms seriously.

The nature of the relationship between international humanitarian law and international human rights law remains a vexed one. In recent years, human rights lawyers and activists have sought to apply human rights norms to military conduct in international and internal conflicts, and during belligerent occupations. With varying degrees of success, complainants have brought their cases before international tribunals, and to national courts able to apply international human rights standards. This development has occurred largely because forums exist to hear human rights claims, whereas they do not for persons claiming individual redress for violations of international humanitarian law. However, human rights norms have also been seen as more restrictive: as placing greater constraints on States' freedom to conduct hostilities, preventively detain, and administer occupied territories. It is for this reason that some States have resisted attempts to extend the reach of international human rights law into areas traditionally seen as governed by international humanitarian law. This chapter argues that principles have now developed to govern the relationship between the two bodies of law. However, their application to different situations remains a work-in-progress and controversies remain. In particular, despite valient efforts, it remains unclear what what happens in situations where the two bodies of law cannot be read together? There are only few rules of norm-conflict resolution in international law, all of which have limited application in the context of the relationship between international humanitarian law and human rights law. Most inconsistencies between the rules of the two bodies of law are not true conflicts at all, as they do not require States to conduct themselves in different ways. It is simply that international humanitarian law is the more permissive system. In such situations, to argue that the two bodies of law are ‘complementary and mutually reinforcing’ is to do little more than issue a policy prescription. In reality, in such cases States have to make a choice as regards which rules they wish to comply (a choice which is likely to be a political one) and take the consequences. There are fundamental incompatibilities between international humanitarian law and human rights law, not only as regards discrete rules but in their theoretical bases. Attempts can be made to reconcile them, to avoid conflicts, but they can only be provisional and on a case-by-case basis. The legal tools available cannot always provide an answer. Absent legislation, conflicts will remain. And in a world of States with differing interests and values, the adoption of new rules governing armed conflict and belligerent occupation will be difficult, if not impossible. One difference between the two bodies of rules, in particular, remains fundamental. Despite developments over past decades which are said to indicate a ‘humanization of humanitarian law’, international humanitarian law, in contrast to human rights law, is not based on an individual rights paradigm. It is this difference, even excluding the differences in the substantive protections accorded individuals under the two bodies of law, which will ensure that individuals continue to bring complaints regarding their treatment in situations of armed conflict before human rights bodies. And even if human rights bodies take the view that States’ human rights obligations in situations of armed conflict are to be interpreted using the yardstick of international humanitarian law, their interpretations of humanitarian law are likely to differ from lawyers advising States’ defence ministries and armed forces, who are likely to continue to be unhappy with such trespasses into what they see as their chasse gardee.

The presented paper discusses the convergence of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in armed conflicts. International human rights law and the human rights law converge and interact with each other because natural law is at the core of both these disciplines of public international law. Although international humanitarian law is a lex specialis, the general rules regarding the interpretation of treaties clearly indicate that international human rights law must be interpreted in the context of other rules of international law, and its possible derogations must be compatible with other international obligations of the state, including humanitarian law. In the event of a conflict between international humanitarian law and international human rights law, the mechanism for resolving conflicts between the standards was supplemented by an interpretation based on the principle of ‘system integration’ of the International Court of Justice which results in the ‘humanization’ of international humanitarian law. The evolution of the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights, which takes into account the international humanitarian law as the reference norm that should be referred to, demonstrates the close relationship between these areas of law. In the case of the application of universal and regional instruments of international human rights law, we are dealing with the ‘humanitarianization’ of these rights.

Advancing Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights:The Way Forward Mary Robinson (bio) A timely and significant debate has begun on how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other civil society actors can most effectively influence states and third party actors to progressively implement their economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights obligations. The debate is timely because too little attention has been paid in the past to this important area of human rights work. It is significant because it can help energize a human rights community worldwide that has felt battered and bruised by the erosion of international standards protecting civil and political rights in our post-September 11 world. It is even more noteworthy because the debate has begun in the United States, where skepticism about the full international human rights agenda has been strongest. During my five-year term as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, I emphasized that we had entered a new era for human rights following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. We had an opportunity to move on from the sterile years when Western countries focused almost exclusively on the importance of civil and political rights and used these in their critique of Soviet bloc countries and many developing countries, while those countries in turn emphasized economic and social rights while rejecting criticism of their political structures and lack of civil rights protection. The time had finally come to take the two sets of rights equally seriously, as the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights intended, and to find the most effective ways to promote and protect them. A number of steps were taken at the international level during this period, which helped strengthen efforts to better define and implement [End Page 866] economic, social, and cultural rights. New mandates were created by the UN Commission on Human Rights which appointed special rapporteurs in areas such as education, food, and the highest attainable standard of health as well as an independent expert on the right to development, all of whom have made substantive contributions to advancing the agenda on these issues. At the request of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) worked to develop human rights guidelines for Poverty Reduction Strategies. Important strides were also made by UN agencies and programs following Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call for human rights to be mainstreamed throughout the UN system. Key UN bodies, from the UN Development Program to the World Health Organization and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), emphasized the human rights framework in implementing their mandates. They and other UN actors adopted a common understanding of what they would mean by "a rights-based approach." As part of this effort, OHCHR has increased its cooperation with UN country teams working on economic and social development issues. Regional meetings have reviewed national case law and shared experiences of how different national courts and regional systems were addressing international commitments concerning economic, social, and cultural rights. Meanwhile, my travels as High Commissioner brought me in contact with human rights activists and NGOs in every region that were finding innovative ways to hold their governments accountable for the commitments they had made under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ratified by 149 states), the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (ratified by 177 states), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (ratified by 192 states), all of which also include specific provisions concerning ESC rights. I recall, for example, the way in which a wide cross section of Brazilian NGOs prepared an alternative report to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in order to bring home the government of Brazil's failure to produce a required report to the Committee within the time allowed under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This effort proved to be a turning point, resulting in more constructive debate on rights throughout Brazil, and caused the government to step up efforts to fulfill its international human rights commitments. Major international NGOs were also expanding their work to include research, policy...

Economic Sanctions Against Human Rights Violations

Global inequities persist despite the achievements of the human rights project so far, as Kofi Annan highlighted in 2005. Caribbean calls for reparations for chattel slavery are a manifestation of and a response to global inequities that affect the Global South in particular. However, when endeavouring to find a footing in international law, and specifically in international human rights law, reparations calls have been contested and challenged. This article proposes a reimagining of the international human rights system to offer a legitimate place for reparations for chattel slavery and thus enable an effective challenge to pressing injustices such as racial discrimination and its ramifications. Despite being a region that has been birthed from such profound historical injustices that still affect the full realisation of human rights today, the Caribbean and its human rights challenges and calls for justice have been relegated to and maintained at the periphery of international human rights law. For that reason, this article focuses on reparations for slavery emanating from the Caribbean. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), it argues that the inability of international legal systems to respond to historical injustices indicates that the colonial imagination, constructed on the compass of exclusion, is still the foundation of international human rights law and of modern, postcolonial societies. The article thus advocates for decolonising international human rights law to accommodate a more inclusive future for human rights.

The debate on whether AWS are consistent with international law has largely focussed on International Humanitarian Law. This is so because AWS are considered military weapons - therefore, meant to be used in armed conflict where international humanitarian law is the applicable regime. However, other scholars emphasise that international human rights law is equally relevant in the AWS debate. When the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions first presented his report on AWS to the UN Human Rights Council in 2013, there was a number of states who felt that the issue of AWS is not within the mandate of the Human Rights Council because it concerns military weapons, a subject that is governed by International Humanitarian Law and belonging to the disarmament forum. In this paper, I consider the relevance of International Human Rights Law to the AWS debate and the question whether AWS are consistent with human rights norms that seek to protect important rights such as the right to life and dignity.In summary, the arguments I make in this paper are that International Human Rights Law is relevant to the AWS debate and discussions should occur both in disarmament and human rights fora. This precisely because of three major points: firstly, when assessing the legality of new weapons, the Martens Clause specifically provides that principles of international law – of which human rights are part – must be taken into consideration. Secondly, International Human Rights Law continues to apply in armed conflict. Thirdly and finally, in most cases weapons that are initially made to be used only in the context of armed conflict always find their way to law enforcement situations because of their utility. In view of human rights standards, I argue that AWS, if used in law enforcement situations, may be incapable of complying with the right to life, dignity, remedy and due process rights. With regards to the right to life, the argument is that AWS may not comply with the ‘protect life principle’ which is a high standard as far as the protection of the right to life is concerned.As for the right to dignity, the argument is that just in as much as soldiers in armed conflict are entitled to dignity, so are suspected criminals and other people who may be caught up in a situation where law enforcement officials use force. Dignity to this end, may not allow that the decision to take life and the legal calculations to comply with the high standard of the ‘protect life principle’ or other norms pertaining the use of force against humans be taken by machines. I also argue that if AWS are used in law enforcement scenarios, they are unlikely to comply with due process rights that should be accorded to suspects. Furthermore, the protection of human rights is dependent on accountability of violations. Now that AWS pose problems to responsibility mechanisms in international law, their use threatens victims’ right to remedy.I also discuss the use of AWS across state borders and how it is likely to raise the issue of extraterritorial application of human rights in the case of armed drones. Similarly, I observe that the use of AWS is likely to be met with lack of transparency as has been the case with armed drones.

This chapter discusses the question of whether third states are prohibited from sending their armed forces to requesting states implicated in widespread violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. Article 3 of the Resolution on Military Assistance by Request of the Institut de Droit International (IDI) 2011 has stimulated the debate, in as far as it claims that the ‘sending of armed forces by one state to another state upon the latter’s request’ is prohibited if it is in violation of ‘generally accepted standards of human rights’. This statement may be read in various ways. First, it can be understood as meaning that the troops of the intervening (assisting) state themselves must adhere to international human rights standards when exercising force at the request of the territorial (recipient) state. However, article 3 of the IDI 2011 Resolution could also be interpreted as prohibiting direct military assistance that would result in the aiding or assisting of human rights violations by the recipient state. The chapter then considers the incurrence and consequences of derivative state responsibility of an intervening state under customary international law for the violations of international human rights and humanitarian law of the territorial state. In so doing, the analysis is informed by case law and doctrine relating to derivative responsibility for such violations through conduct stopping short of direct military support.

The nature of armed conflict has changed dramatically in recent decades. In particular, it is increasingly the case that hostilities now occur alongside ‘everyday’ situations. This has led to a pressing need to determine when a ‘conduct of hostilities’ model (governed by international humanitarian law – IHL) applies and when a ‘law enforcement’ model (governed by international human rights law – IHRL) applies. This, in turn, raises the question of whether these two legal regimes are incompatible or whether they might be applied in parallel. It is on this question that the current article focuses, examining it at the level of principle. Whilst most accounts of the principles underlying these two areas of law focus on humanitarian considerations, few have compared the role played by necessity in each. This article seeks to address this omission. It demonstrates that considerations of necessity play a prominent role in both IHL and IHRL, albeit with differing consequences. It then applies this necessity-based analysis to suggest a principled basis for rationalising the relationship between IHL and IHRL, demonstrating how this approach would operate in practice. It is shown that, by emphasising the role of necessity in IHL and IHRL, an approach can be adopted that reconciles the two in a manner that is sympathetic to their object and purpose.