By stipulating a human rights treaty, States can commit to respect human rights and to fulfil their respective provisions. This does not mean, however, that States are obliged to guarantee human rights to all individuals. Each State must ensure human rights only to individuals subject to its jurisdiction. Thus, the application of human rights treaties is limited.
Nevertheless, the jurisdiction of a State is not limited merely to that State, but also extends extraterritorially when the human rights holder is located outside the territory of the State bound by the treaty provisions. Extraterritoriality is established by each human rights treaty individually, either through a jurisdiction clause that determines the scope of the applicability of the treaty or, in the absence of such a clause, the determination of the scope of applicability of the treaty is left to the interpretation of the provisions of the treaty. For the interpretation general rules of interpretation of international treaties apply, taken together with the special nature of the human rights treaties, which requires a dynamic interpretation in the light of the current circumstances.
Extraterritorial application of human rights treaties is envisaged by both the spatial model of jurisdiction which entails that a State implements control of the territory beyond its state borders and by the personal model of jurisdiction that demands authority or control over individuals whose rights were breached. The adequacy of use of both models was addressed and confirmed by numerous international bodies, such as the International Court of Justice, Human Rights Committee, European Court of Human Rights and Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Eventhough both models represent a good starting point for tackling extraterritorial jurisdiction, they both cannot encompass all the possible breaches of human rights and they systematically lack to address situations where the State does not implement control over the territory beyond its borders, but is able to prevent these breaches within its territory.
This limitation is addressed by the Doctrine of Effect, which gained its form and international recognition in 2017 with the Advisory Opinion OC-23/17 of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and significantly expands the scope of protection of the rights of individuals by the State. Namely, it stipulates that there is jurisdiction if there is a causal link between the actions of the State and the consequence, which constitutes a violation of human rights that the State was able to foresee.
Case law confirming this doctrine is still scarce, as the courts have not yet had the opportunity to address it, however in the practice of international treaty bodies strong tendencies to accept such type of jurisdiction based on causation are noticed.
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