The UN Principles and Guidelines on Reparation: is there an Enforceable Right to Reparation for Victims of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Violations?

The present thesis evaluates the international legal standing of the right to a remedy and reparation contained in the UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law. It focuses on two aspects of the right to a remedy and reparation. First, it examines the application of state responsibility principles to the relationship between states and individuals when human rights and international humanitarian law violations are committed. Secondly, it analyses the convergence of norms of state liability in different branches of international law: human rights law, the law on diplomatic protection, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law. It advances the proposition that state responsibility for reparation in favour of individuals has crystallised in international law. The thesis is divided in four chapters. The first is an introductory chapter. It defines the scope and objective of the study, and identifies and maps the existing scholarly positions on the right to a remedy and reparation for individuals under international law. Chapter 2 describes the law of state responsibility for injuries to aliens and its relationship to the right to reparation in human rights law. Chapter 3 explores the right to reparation for international humanitarian law violations. As a conclusion, Chapter 4 assesses whether the Principles and Guidelines reflect the standards of international law previously analysed. It looks at whether principles of state responsibility can apply to the relationship between individuals and states – a basic presumption of this instrument that was also one of the main sources of contention during the drafting and adoption process at the UN. It concludes that individuals can invoke state responsibility directly under contemporary international law through an actionable right to reparation for serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law that constitute international wrongful acts.