International Protection of Human Rights and Responsibility of the State before the International Court of Justice

The increasing number of human rights based claims before the International Court of Justice raises the question of their implementation in the framework of generalist and interstate litigation. The procedure of the Court has been thought and conceived for the defence of subjective interests of States. Therefore, the Court seems unable to take into account the complex legal relationships in which lies State responsibility for internationally guaranteed human rights violations and its scope, limited to bilateral responsibility amongst State parties. But, instead of conceiving the legal connections in dispute as to the only State parties or as external to the individual, the Court endorses a correlation approach. Tripartite relations emerge between the State perpetrator of the human rights violation, other States which are equally creditor and bearer of the obligations infringed and the individual who holds the rights. However although the Court is ready to clarify or even conceptualize the legal relationships involved, it does not distort its traditional judicial function. While the individual is taken into account in the incurrence of State responsibility it is nevertheless marginalized in its implementation, which continues to be centered on the State and defined by public international law. This particular conception of State responsibility for human rights violations underlines that it cannot be reduced to the relation between the individual and the State, for which other selfless States would stand guarantor as the most, but that it also and directly determines interstate relations.