State Parties' Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations

Extraterritorial operation,in today's trend of globalization,has become an increasingly normal behavior for nations with global exposure,and those countries could potentially,as a consequence of their growing extraterritorial operation,commit human rights violations during the operation which take place outside of the nation's territory.There comes the question whether the state parities of the human rights treaty shall fulfill their obligations concerning human rights specified in the treaty when executing their extraterritorial operations.This is the one question that,although already attracts great attention of jurisprudence circle in global scale,few systematic and comprehensive studies has been conducted by domestic scholars in China.Firstly,in order to solve this problem,one needs to determine whether the human rights treaty itself has imposed a limit to the scope of its human rights obligations.At present,most human rights treaties have jurisdiction clause,and 'jurisdiction' is the essential condition for a state party to hold responsible for its violation with respect to its abuse of human right or freedom conduct.Therefore,we need to clearly define the particular meaning of 'jurisdiction'in human rights treaties.The first chapter of the thesis,by introducing the development of 'jurisdiction' meaning in the human rights treaties and analyzing its distinction with what has been defined in general international law,reveals the fact that 'control' is the true meaning of jurisdiction defined in human right treaty.Secondly,human rights institutions,in common practice,generally define 'jurisdiction'as the de facto control by a nation over a certain territory or individual,and concluded the "effective control of an area" standard and "authority and control over individual"standard to identify the extraterritorial jurisdiction.The second chapter of the thesis addressed the aforementioned by sorting and summarizing relevant cases and detailed analysis,and briefly summarized the issue with the two standards stated previously.And finally,given that in practice,defining the extraterritorial obligation of human rights for state parties could still be troublesome,by introducing the distinctions among positive and negative obligations of human rights,the third chapter of thesis pinpoints the control elements in extraterritorial jurisdiction,and proposed a more uniform and clarified definition standard when addressing extraterritorial human rights obligation.