The Extraterritorial Duty To Respect Human Rights In The Inter-American Human Rights System

A Sustained Protection of Dignity

Abstract

The Inter-American Commission and Court have demonstrated, in their practice, greater coherence and consistency with the postulates and foundations of the human rights regime than those demonstrated by their European counterpart in terms of identifying circumstances in which extraterritorial jurisdiction and the correlative obligation of respect exist, the contravention of which entails the generation of state responsibility. The inter-American approach is based on a model that can be called impact-based or causation-based, which activates jurisdiction beyond state borders in those circumstances in which there is a direct causal relationship between the conduct of a State outside its territory and causing damage to the exercise of human rights. In this article, we argue that the inter-American approach—functional and not spatial in nature —can serve as inspiration for other systems and should be maintained.