The EU's Human Rights Responsibility Gap - Exhuming Human Rights Impunity of International Organizations

Abstract

At the intersection of international, EU and human rights law, this book poses the following question: Can the European Union – a sui generis international organization – be held legally responsible for contributions to unlawful human rights conduct independently of and in concert with its Member States? Moving beyond conventional inquiries, the book breaks new ground by not merely assessing the EU's contributions to human rights violations but by scrutinizing its legal responsibility for such conduct through an integrated and functional approach, in the interest of the right to an effective remedy. Relying on the EU’s Integrated Border Management (IBM) as an illustration of transnational cooperative governance, the book prompts readers to ponder the intricate issue of apportioning legal responsibility for the EU's contributions to human rights violations in hybrid cooperation scenarios. It sparks a fresh exploration into whether the EU can be held legally responsible for its actions, ushering readers into the multi-layered world of international legal responsibility.

The book addresses two sets of questions in turn. First, it exhumes and analyses the EU’s human rights responsibility regime, unveiling three distinct incongruency clusters: normative incongruency, liability incongruency and actor-forum incongruency. Secondly, the book analyses these incongruency clusters through four case studies in IBM. Building on these theoretical and practical findings, the book advances ‘relational human rights responsibility’ as an alternative framework to overcome the identified incongruences and subsequent misalignments in the EUs human rights responsibility regime, in the interest of the right to an effective remedy.

Keywords: Human Rights Impunity, Shared Responsibility; Human Rights Complicity; EU; International Organizations; Relational Human Rights Responsibility