André Nollkaemper is Professor of Public International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam. He directs the project on ‘Shared Responsibility in International Law’ (SHARES); this piece is cross-posted on the SHARES Blog.
On 13 December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’) found the that the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (‘Macedonia’) was responsible in connection with the ill-treatment and torture of Khaled El-Masri. The judgment adds a further chapter to the Court’s rich case law on situations where a state party is held responsible in connection with the (wrongful) acts of another state.
El-Masri, a Lebanese-born German national, alleged that in the period from 31 December 2003 to 29 May 2004 he had been subjected to a secret rendition operation, in which agents of Macedonia had arrested him, held him incommunicado, questioned and ill-treated him, and handed him over at Skopje Airport to CIA agents who then transferred him to Afghanistan, where he had been detained and ill-treated for over four months.
No one who reads the facts of the case will argue with the Court’s conclusion that Macedonia had to bear international responsibility. The question is on what grounds one can base this conclusion.
The approach chosen by the Court may surprise many international lawyers. Influenced by decades of work of the International Law Commission (‘ILC’), their approach would be a combination of attribution of conduct on the one hand and the breach of an international obligation, on the other: Macedonia then would be responsible for handing over El-Masri to the CIA, in the face of risk (if not certainty) that he would be ill-treated and tortured. They would not normally say that the act of ill-treatment at the hands of the CIA itself is attributed to Macedonia, but limit Macedonia´s responsibility to its own wrongful conduct. This distinction may seem a legal nicety, but it may have practical relevance (for questions of evidence and reparation) and also reflects that what is essentially a sovereignty-based consideration: it should not easily be presumed that a state is responsible for acts committed by another subject of international law.
The Court takes a somewhat different approach. But it is quite difficult to figure out what exactly this approach is. While the fact that the Court does not feel compelled to follow the ILC´s conceptual straightjacket is in many respects refreshing, its own line is at times somewhat inconsistent and confusing. For one thing, it is difficult to see why the Court uses interchangeably the terms ´attribution´ and ´imputation´ – one may guess that the Court uses the latter when it seeks to leave aside the ILC´s approach, but it would be nice if the Court would not invite us to speculate.
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