Things Could Only Get Better: Al-Jedda beyond Behrami

Abstract

In July 2011, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held in Al-Jedda v. United Kingdom that the UK was responsible for the misconduct of its troops deployed as part of the UN-authorized Multinational Force in Iraq. Together with two other recent cases, Al-Saadoon and Al-Skeini, this may be the start of a trend in the ECtHR directed at clarifying and expanding the scope of the European Convention by partially overcoming two notorious sets of precedents: the Behrami jurisprudence on the attribution of conduct of military personnel involved in operations under UN auspices; and the particularly ambiguous Bankovic jurisprudence on the extraterritorial scope of human rights protection. This article focuses on the Behrami side of Al-Jedda’s story: the question of attribution of conduct. Despite the attempts by the ECtHR to pay lip-service to Behrami by distinguishing it on the facts, the practical result of Al-Jedda is that Behrami should no longer be considered ‘good law’ when it comes to attribution of conduct during UN-authorized peace support operations. This is a major development, given that Behrami was almost universally criticised by legal commentators for being wrong both as a matter of law and as a matter of policy.