ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses human rights protection on the high seas in relation to the obligations of flag states and the opportunity for ‘judicial’ redress after a breach has taken place. Firstly, this chapter introduces the three regional human rights systems in Europe, the Americas and Africa as well as the UN human rights system. It is a short introduction, focusing on the relevant treaty provisions creating obligations about liberty of person, which is the material right that this chapter takes its starting point from. Secondly, states’ extraterritorial obligations and, more specifically, states’ obligations on the high seas under the identified systems are laid out and scrutinized. With the Kaunas Seaways incident in the Black Sea in 2017 in the background, the chapter then asks the justiciability question. If the incident had happened to a ship flagged to Panama, Liberia or the Marshall Islands, what would the response in the American, the African and the UN-systems respectively have been? UNCLOS does not regulate human rights obligations and judicial redress; however, the very explicit reliance in UNCLOS on the flag state’s ‘exclusive’ jurisdiction on the high seas provides the key hinge to bring together the flag state and human rights.
