States of Emergency - Centre for Policy Alternatives

The past Live decades – the post World War II, United Nations era –
has seen the development of international human rights law and
practice, both in terms of wide codiLication in binding multilateral
treaties and in the promotion of behavioural standards. These set
out the nature and scope of positive rights and their permitted
restrictions. In this chapter, we examine how international human
rights norms apply within the domestic jurisdiction, especially in
terms of their enforcement mechanisms, and how they seek to
regulate derogations from international obligations to protect
those rights during states of emergency. We do not intend to give
an account of the range of rights available under international
human rights law. Our concern is to see how international human
rights law accommodates states of emergency by allowing, within
set limits, derogations from human rights during crises.
This chapter is a general overview of the international regime of
human rights with regard to its scope of application and
regulation of derogations during states of emergency. The
speciLicities of the interface between international human rights
and the experience of states of emergency within the Sri Lankan
domestic jurisdiction will be addressed in Part II of the book.
While our primary focus is on the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights (ICCPR), its First Optional Protocol, and its
treaty body, the Human Rights Committee, as the multilateral
regime that applies to Sri Lanka, for the purposes of a comparative
understanding, we also refer where appropriate to the European
and Inter‐American regional systems. The African Charter is not
discussed here, because although it does not contain a formal
derogations regime, suggesting at Lirst glance that no derogations
are permitted, it is a peculiarly relativist document with many
discrete limitations on the exercise of rights which are not
compatible with a universalist understanding of human rights.
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