ABSTRACT
The relevant points identified in the discussion of counterarguments in Chapter 7 provide the basis for this chapter—the book’s core part—which develops elements of a justificatory theory of extraterritorial human rights obligations. It is built on two clusters of elements: First, the nature of human rights obligations, which is already in tension with the idea that they only apply to a certain part of state conduct; second, the nature of the state as a human rights duty-bearer and its ambivalent role as being at the same time the ‘principal violator’ as well as the ‘essential protector’ of human rights. The chapter argues that the latter is linked to a triad of aspects of states’ nature as institutions, which in turn is reflected in the multidimensionality of human rights obligations. Against this background, the chapter explains why statehood is a sufficient (though probably not a necessary) condition of being subject to human rights obligations, and that these normative constraints also regulate a state’s diagonal relations to individuals abroad, who are also routinely exposed to the effects of foreign states’ actions. States’ institutional nature and the specific kind of exposedness ‘outsiders’ find themselves in vis-à-vis foreign states further add to the importance and urgency of extraterritorial human rights obligations. The chapter ends with an analysis of its implications for the concept of state sovereignty.
