ABSTRACT
The international community continues to experience global crises that not only threaten human rights and development but also necessitate transnational and collaborative action in addressing them and the need to intensify and rethink approaches to international cooperation and assistance, including development assistance. This chapter explains development assistance and its legal basis, the nature and scope of states’ extraterritorial obligations (ETOs) in the context of development assistance, highlighting donor states’ ETOs to respect, protect and fulfil rights when engaging in development assistance, including their obligation to offer assistance. As ETOs of donor states does not leave recipient/territorial states off the hook (that is, they too have international human rights obligations to comply with), the chapter also briefly highlights recipient states’ obligations, specifically their obligation to seek assistance. The chapter then considers the relationship between human rights and development assistance, with specific focus on what a human rights-based approach to development assistance entails.
