How Can the Human Rights Legal Framework Address the Violation of Human Rights Extraterritorially?

Abstract

The armed conflict in Ukraine has been ongoing since 2014. As to date, the total number of recorded deaths has exceeded ten thousands civilians and combatants. Every day, i.e. during the present research, this number has been increasing. As outlined above, the European regional system of human rights protection, epitomised by the ECtHR, addresses this challenge within two interrelated tracks: individual and inter-State applications. The research focuses on landmark decisions of international, regional, and domestic courts in terms of human rights extraterritorially by way of establishing human rights duty-bearer jurisdiction outside states’ boundaries based on effective control test. It scrutinizes the jurisprudence of the ECtHR in terms of inconsistency between Bankovic and Aj-Jedda cases. In turn, the paper aims to model extraterritorial application of human rights law in Ukraine v. Russia inter-State applications (re Crimea and re Eastern Ukraine) based on Loizidou precedent as well as describes new forms of Russia’s violations of human rights in Crimea.