Towards a Division of Labour for Sustainable Development: Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 are the new and ambitious global development agenda for the 2015-2030 period. That global agenda can only be realized through a global effort. What does that mean for the division of labour? Traditionally, fostering development has been seen as the primary responsibility of the territorial State. This chapter reflects from a human rights perspective on the role to be played by external governmental and intergovernmental actors in bringing about sustainable development. It ponders strengths and weaknesses of the right to development and extraterritorial human rights obligations, and identifies five challenges for human rights law: the legal status of the obligations to cooperate internationally; the distributive allocation of extraterritorial obligations; the triggers of extraterritorial human rights obligations; the scope of the extraterritorial obligation to cooperate for development; and the ability of human rights law to engage with strong definitions of development, which take growth agnosticism as their starting point.