2 - Establishing State Responsibility for Human Rights Violations: Proposal for a Conduct-Based Typology of Human Rights Obligations

Summary

In order to discuss how the rules on state responsibility may be adjusted to better address human rights violations by non-state actors, it is essential to analyze what concrete responsibilities are to be derived from international human rights law. It is against this background that the second chapter starts by reviewing existing human rights typologies and discusses why – even though these typologies foster the understanding of the historical development of human rights and different human rights categories – they do not provide any further insights on the concrete content of human rights obligations and the circumstances under which state responsibility for human rights violations might be triggered. Therefore, the second chapter proposes a different typology of human rights which is oriented toward the concept of state responsibility. It takes a closer look at what precise obligations might be taken from international human rights obligations and how those obligations could be typologized.