Since , however, observers [1] have noted radical departures from that interpretation in the practice of certain international human rights bodies. Those new understandings of human rights jurisdiction abroad mostly pertain to positive human rights duties, i. This Reflection contests the justification of those interpretations of human rights jurisdiction.
What seems to be driving them is not a new type of jurisdiction, but the due diligence standard itself. Reducing human rights jurisdiction to a mere capacity to harm in this way risks diluting the relational specificity of human rights and, by extension, undermining the coherence of international human rights law as a whole.
My argument is four-pronged. I start with a few generalities about jurisdiction under international human rights law and the extraterritoriality of human rights Section 1 followed by an account of the personal and geographic scope of due diligence in international law Section 2.
In the following section I present the recent departures in the interpretation of the human rights jurisdiction condition and critically analyse them Section 3.
I conclude with a few alternative considerations about how best to ground, under contemporary international law, extraterritorial obligations to prevent, protect against and remedy diligently the kind of harm at stake in those cases Section 4.
