The Limits of Positive Obligations in Human Rights Law: From Protection to Coercion

This open access book is a crucial intervention in the debate concerning positive human rights obligations.

There is nowadays no dispute in human rights doctrine over whether rights entail positive duties on the part of the state at the level of principle. But there has been surprisingly little academic commentary devoted to the question of whether there are, or should be, limits placed on how far those obligations extend. Similarly, there has not been very much scholarly attention paid to the question of how causation can be reasonably attributed in the context of violations of positive obligations. And there are very few sociological explanations provided as to why positive human rights obligations appear to be expanding without principled limits in the first place, as they clearly are.

This volume assembles the work of a range of leading scholars in international human rights law to fill these gaps in the literature. Each of its 11 substantive chapters addresses an aspect of positive obligations with a particular focus on issues concerning limits. Taken together they provide the first serious attempt to grapple critically with the subject of the limits, causality and scope of positive obligations theoretically and doctrinally. This makes the book essential reading for scholars of human rights law.