Keywords
positive obligations
effectiveness of human rights
horizontal dimension of fundamental rights
margin of appreciation
How to Cite
Abstract
Belonging both to the European and inter-American courts of human rights case-law, positive obligations are defined as a duty for states to effectively secure the rights and freedoms set out in regional conventions. As a judicial product, these obligations are the result of a dynamic interpretation of the 1950 and 1969 conventions. The judges have to determine their existence and their impact which might exceed the vertical dimension of human rights. According to the European and inter-American decisions, positive obligations impose on States the duty to prevent any violations of human rights but also to investigate and punish the perpetrator or perpetrators of those violations. This double content —material
obligations and procedural obligations— seems to a certain extente to condition on the control exercised by judges on obligations which remain obligations of means for States.
This journal is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
Approving the intervention of the work (review, copy-editing, translation, layout) and the following outreach, are granted through an use license and not through an assignment of rights. This means the journal and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana cannot be held responsible for any ethical malpractice by the authors. As a consequence of the protection granted by the use license, the journal is not required to publish recantations or modify information already published, unless the errata stems from the editorial management process. Publishing contents in this journal does not generate royalties for contributors.