ABSTRACT
The paper explores the historical affinity between international human rights law and rights of states to natural resources and the aim of both systems to realize international justice. The paper argues that the chief purpose of human rights is to provide a universal standard for regulating the behaviour of states, to limit their sovereignty for the sake of promoting welfare and protecting equal moral status of individuals. The key point of the paper is then to show that due to the historical co-originality and due to the transformative impact human rights have had on state sovereignty, international human rights law has direct implication for how we should interpret the scope of states’ rights to natural resources.
