Abstract
There have been a string of decisions in recent years by the European Court of Human Rights concerning the peacekeeping operations and sanctions regimes pursuant to a mandate of the United Nations Security Counci lin which Member States of the Council of Europe take part. These include the cases of Bankovic v. Belgium, Bosphorus v. Ireland, Behrami v. France and al-Jedda v. United Kingdom in addition to the decision of the European Court of Justice in Kadi v. Council of the European Union. These decisions have raised important issues concerning the justiciability before the Strasbourg Court of these actions, the attribution of international responsibility to the UN and/or to the Member States and the applicability of European human rights standards to the operations of Member States when acting pursuant to a UN Security Council mandate. The putative accession of the European Union to the European Convention on Human Rights 1950 potentially amplifies the importance of these issues. For the first time, EU organs will join the jurisdiction of an external court empowered to hold them accountable to external human rights standards. In EU operations under the Common Foreign and Security Policy, particularly peacekeeping operations, this accountability is likely to test the tension in the law of international responsibility concerning the attribution of responsibility to an international organisation or to Member States. There is also the possibility of divergence between competing human rights norms under EU law, the ECHR and UN law. In a doctrinal analysis of the ILC Articles on State Responsibility and the ILC Draft Articles on the Responsibility of International Organisations with special reference to the aforementioned jurisprudence, the paper aims to identify the analytical problems likely to arise in a CFSP case before the Strasbourg Court. In so doing, it particularly focuses upon the attribution of concurrent or exclusive responsibility in CFSP operations, judicial review by the Strasbourg Court of the lawfulness of UN Security Council resolutions and a special regime of EU law displacing the general law of international responsibility. It considers the likelihood that the Strasbourg Court will be prompted to adopt a more activist policy concerning the responsibility of Member States for operations taken pursuant to UN Security Council mandates as a consequence of EU accession to the ECHR.