Human rights in the private sphere : horizontality in the European and inter-American systems of human rights

Despite empirical evidence of violations of human rights by corporations, international human rights law has focused almost exclusively on the responsibility of the state for its violations without considering non-state actors. This raises significant questions regarding accountability in the so-called ‘private’ sphere. The emergence of considerations beyond the narrow state-centred approach has been made by employing dynamic interpretions of the law to extend the positive obligations of states to encompass the actions and omissions of non-state actors; this is sometimes referred to as horizontality or the third-party approach. This preliminary paper outlines some perspectives on the potentiality of human rights law in the Inter-American Human Rights System and the European Court of Human Rights by way of an exploratory investigation into their respective case-law.