ABSTRACT

The policy and practice of any given state has an impact on the enjoyment of human rights not only on the part of people within that state’s sovereign territory. Also, often there is a significant extraterritorial impact on people in the rest of the world. In the case of civil and political rights, relevant extraterritorial activity includes the conduct of warfare, occupation, other military action, anti-migration and anti-piracy initiatives at sea, sanctions regimes, extraordinary rendition, strikes by so-called ‘drones’ and the operation of extraterritorial detention and interrogation sites housing combatants and migrants, including refugees. An area of international law also named ‘jurisdiction’ exists separately from international human rights law. A 2008 decision of the European Court of Human Rights appears to suggest that merely being subject to lethal armed force could be sufficient to fall within the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the state responsible for that action.