Of Rights and Remedies: Sovereign Immunity and Fundamental Human Rights

In the current paper the authors analyze the relationship between international immunities and funamental human rights from a particular methodological angle. They maintain that the difficulty in dealing with that issue mainly lies in the asymmetry in the development of the international law of human rights, which has created individual substantive rights without creating a corresponding set of remedies. At the level of primary norms, international law has developed, and continues to develop, substantive rules granting rights and duties to individuals; however, the secondary level, concerning the consequences of the breach of such primary obligations and the mechanisms of enforcement, is still largely inspired by the classical inter-State philosophy. This shortcoming can explain the troubled relationship between sovereign immunity and fundamental human rights, with resct to both State immunity and State organs’ immunity.