Jurisdiction and Responsibility

This chapter examines the overarching trends in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights on questions of State jurisdiction in the sense of Article 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights and State responsibility, after its seminal judgment in the Al-Skeini case. While the chapter makes no claim to comprehensiveness of coverage, it first discusses the threshold question of the extraterritorial applicability of human rights treaties, and analyses the relationship between the notions of jurisdiction and responsibility, specifically looking at the recent Jaloud v Netherlands case. It then examines the issue of the relationship between human rights and international humanitarian law and the European Court’s judgment in Hassan v The United Kingdom. This chapter’s main thesis is that the Court is growing increasingly comfortable with applying the Convention extraterritorially and in armed conflict, as well as in directly invoking rules of international humanitarian law. However, a number of important caveats and uncertainties remain in the Court’s jurisprudence, which will inevitably be at issue in important cases currently pending or soon to be pending before it, eg the many interstate and individual applications dealing with the conflict in Ukraine.