Description
British foreign fighters throughout the Islamic State’s former ‘Caliphate’ are currently being detained in conditions which fail to meet basic human rights standards. This analysis seeks to investigate whether Britain has legal and moral obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights to protect its citizens from these violations. Legal jurisprudence has seen traditional territorial understandings of jurisdiction increasingly supplemented by notions of effective control. Though norms on the extraterritorial application of human rights treaties are still emerging, there is significant evidence that Britain does have obligations to its imprisoned foreign fighters which it is currently failing to meet. By refusing assistance to these individuals and in some cases actively removing the protections afforded to them, Britain is delineating who is and who is not perceived to be deserving of rights. Ultimately, this is fundamentally at odds with the universalist spirit of the Convention and detrimental to the wider institution of international human rights law.
