Challenging Territoriality in Human Rights Law: Building Blocks for a Plural and Diverse Duty-Bearer Regime

This edited volume challenges the territorial bias of traditional human rights law, in which human rights obligations are in principle incumbent on the territorial state. The first part of this volume examines the current state of the extraterritorial human rights obligations of international financial institutions, looking in particular at the ways in which they address questions of attribution and distribution of obligations (and responsibility for violations). The second part is geared towards the identification of common principles that may underpin a human rights legal regime that incorporates obligations of extraterritorial states as well as of non-state actors. Each chapter examines novel and forward-looking perspectives in the field, and explores how the findings may apply across international human rights law in a multi duty-bearer setting.

Wouter Vandenhole teaches human rights and holds the UNICEF Chair in Children’s Rights at the Faculty of Law of the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He chairs the Law and Development Research Group of his Faculty, and the European Research Networking Programme GLOTHRO (Beyond Territoriality: Globalization and Transnational Human Rights Obligations). Vandenhole sits on the editorial board of Human Rights andInternational Legal Discourse and of the Journal of Human Rights Practice. He has researched and published widely on economic, social and cultural rights, children’s rights and transnational human rights obligations. Key publications on transnational human rights obligations include: ’Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations: Taking Stock, Looking Forward’ (2013) European Journal of Human Rights; M. Gibney and W. Vandenhole (eds), Litigating Transnational Human Rights Obligations: Alternative Judgments, Routledge Research in Human Rights Law (Routedge 2014); and M. Langford, W. Vandenhole, M. Scheinin and W. van Genugten (eds), Global Justice, State Duties. The Extraterritorial Scope of Economic, Social and Cultural Rightsin International Law (CUP 2013).