Bill Ashcroft Et Al - The Post-Colonial Studies Reader

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GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS*
B y L      M    * *    AW B    S      * * *
I. T  I              B     A       
    (  )      C        
Downloaded from http://bybil.oxfordjournals.org/ at Yale University on July 24, 2015

At a technical level this article offers an analysis of the interaction
between Articles  and  of the European Convention, and Article  of
the First Protocol. At a more general level we wish to raise for discussion
a neglected issue: what can be done in the twenty-first century about the
fact that the European Convention still embodies anomalous relics of the
world of European colonialism? For Article  was the colonial clause,
though this title did not feature in the text of the Convention. It has sub-
sequently been renumbered and renamed more innocently ‘Territorial
Application’. A related Article , another colonial clause, was included
in the First Protocol; it too has been renamed. This tinkering reflects, no
doubt, a recognition that the world of the European colonial empires,
now something of an embarrassment, has passed away. But these two
articles, a product of that world, remain, and scant attention has been
given to the implications of this for the interpretation of a Convention
which, it is now settled, is to be interpreted as a living instrument. We
shall conclude by considering these implications. We shall primarily
be concerned with the application of the two articles to the United
Kingdom and its overseas dependencies. It was, as we shall see, almost
wholly as a result of pressure from the United Kingdom that the original
Convention permitted the voluntary extension of the Convention, either
at the time of ratification or later, to ‘all or any of the territories for whose
international relations’ the contracting state was responsible, and the
First Protocol permitted, more generously, such extension to be accom-
panied with reservations. The option to extend entailed an option not to
extend; a power to extend protection could be used to deny it.
* We are grateful to Sonia Boutillon, Undine von Diemar, Theodora Christou, Rolf Einar Fife,
Changez Khan, Laura Harlow, Jana Krenova, Nuala Mole, Andrew Thompson, Grace Tonner, and
Kristien Vandervoorden for valuable assistance. We are also indebted, as ever, to the remarkable
service provided by the Library of the University of Michigan Law School.
** BA, LLB , Auckland; LLM , Michigan; currently Refugee/Amuesty International
Officer, International Secretariat.
*** Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School.
 The heading was changed by the th Protocol. The text of  () is a revised version of  ().
 Articles derivative of Article  feature in the th, th, th, th, and th Protocols; in the th
Protocol the expression ‘territories for the international relations of which it is responsible . . . . ’ is
used. In the th and later Protocols the word territory is unqualified. We do not discuss the terri-
torial clauses in later Protocols.
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 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
The concept of jurisdiction came to be used to define the scope of

Convention protection, and there is now a considerable jurisprudence
concerning its extraterritorial reach. This is largely related to the words
‘within their jurisdiction’ in Article : ‘The High Contracting Parties
shall secure to everyone within their jurisdiction the rights and freedoms
defined in Section  of this Convention.’ Briefly the drafting history is as
follows. The draft produced by the European Movement had as Article :
‘Every State party to this Convention shall guarantee to all persons within
its territory the following rights: . . . . ’ (emphasis added).
The Committee on Legal and Administrative Questions of the

Consultative Assembly proposed as Article : ‘In this Convention, the
Member States shall undertake to ensure to all persons residing within their
territories . . . . ’ (emphasis added) and listed the rights. A majority pro-
posed that the rights should be guaranteed not only to ‘persons residing
within its metropolitan territory but also to all persons residing within its
overseas territories or in its colonial possessions’. In the Assembly this
was not questioned, and the draft was adopted.
The Ministers appointed a Committee of Experts. They adopted the
notion of jurisdiction, rather than that of residence, as critical: ‘The High
Contracting Parties undertake to guarantee to all persons within their
jurisdiction the rights listed in Article  below’ (emphasis added). In
February the draft was slightly modified: ‘The High Contracting Parties
undertake to accord to any person within their jurisdiction the rights
listed . . . ’ (emphasis added). This was explained:
It seemed to the Committee that the term ‘residing’ might be considered too
restrictive. It was felt that there were good grounds for extending the benefit of
the Convention to all persons in the territories of the signatory States, even those
who could not be considered as residing there in the legal sense of the word.
This word, moreover, has not the same meaning in all national laws. The
Committee therefore replaced the term ‘residing’ by the words ‘within their
jurisdiction’ which are also contained in Article  of the Draft Covenant of the
United Nations Commission.
The reach of the Convention was to be primarily territorially based, but the
Travaux Préparatoires do not contain any discussion of precisely what was
meant by ‘within their jurisdiction’, over and above the passage quoted.
 See n  below.  Travaux Préparatoires (hereinafter TP) I –, TP I –.
 TP I .
 TP II –, –. See R Lawson, ‘Life After Bankovic: On the Extraterritorial Application of
the European Convention on Human Rights’ in F Coomans and MT Kamminga (eds),

Extraterritorial Application of Human Rights Treaties () –.
 ‘ . . . s’engagent à garantir à toute personne relevant de leur jurisdiction . . . . ’ And see TP III
–. The French is translated as ‘within their jurisdiction’, even though the word ‘relevant’ does not
have the locational overtones of ‘within’.  TP III –.
 ‘ . . . s’engagent à reconnaitre . . . à toute personne relevant de leur jurisdiction . . . ’ The change from
‘guarantee’ to ‘accord’ is explained.  TP III –.

 TP III –.
 The expression ‘persons within their jurisdiction’ also featured in draft Art , which man-
dates an effective remedy for violations, which eventually became Art . Draft Art  somewhat
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
It is now established that this Article is to be taken as imposing, in gen-

eral, a territorial limitation to protection. Persons ‘within the jurisdiction’
under Article  normally have to be within the territory over which the
Contracting Party exercises jurisdiction, that is legislative, judicial, and
administrative powers. This localization of responsibility will mean that
the violation must normally occur within the relevant territory (and there
may, of course, be difficulties in attributing a location to such violation)
and the victim must be physically present within the territory over which
the Contracting Party exercises sovereignty when the violation takes effect
(again a highly problematic notion). Properly analysed, jurisdiction under

Article  of the Convention is always ratione personae; the purported
victim must be the right sort of person—one ‘within the jurisdiction’. But
in international law jurisdiction is typically conferred by territorial sover-
eignty. As it is put in Banković and others v Belgium and others: ‘As to the
“ordinary meaning” of the relevant term in Article  of the Convention,
the Court is satisfied that, from the standpoint of public international law,
the jurisdictional competence of a State is primarily territorial.’ There
is an oddity in the adoption of the principle stated, for it is, quite explicitly,
concerned with placing limitations on the competence of states, whereas
the issue in relation to the European Convention is not one of restricting
competence but of attributing responsibility. The jurisprudence has never
really addressed the question of why a principle of international law
evolved to set bounds to state power should be used to limit responsibility
under the Convention. There is nothing in the Travaux Préparatoires to
indicate that the matter was ever considered. In Convention jurisprudence,
one might think, the emphasis should not be placed on a doctrine which
imposes limitations on responsibility, but, as the Preamble puts it, on ‘the
maintenance and further realization of human rights and fundamental
freedoms’. Indeed, the emphasis on location which is entailed by the
existing jurisprudence of Article  seems questionable at least; if human
inconsistently used the concept of ‘secured rights and freedoms within its territory’. This article was
designed to ensure that the rules adopted by State parties to secure the protection of the rights and
freedoms should be in accordance with the principles of law recognized by civilized nations. See
TP III –.
 FA Mann, ‘The Doctrine of Jurisdiction in International Law’ () I Academie de Droit
International. Recueil des Cours ff; FA Mann, ‘The Doctrine of Jurisdiction in International Law,
Twenty Years Later’ () III Recueil des Cours ff; ‘Jurisdiction of states’ R Bernhardt (ed),
Encyclopedia of Public International Law () vol , –; and ‘Extraterritorial Effects of
Administrative, Judicial and Legislative Acts’ in R Bernhardt (ed), Encyclopedia of Public
International Law () vol , –; R Jennings and A Watts (eds), Oppenheim’s International Law
(th edn, ) vol , para ; PM Dupuy, Droit International Public (th edn, ) ; I Brownlie,
Principles of International Law (th edn, ) ch  and material cited on  n ; P Capps, M Evans,
and S Konstadinidis (eds), Asserting Jurisdiction. International and European Legal Perspectives ()
chs  (F Berman);  (C Greenwood);  (D McGoldrick); R Higgins, Problems and Process.
International Law and How We Use It () ch  and esp –, Coomans and Kamminga (n  above)
passim.
 No /. Decision as to Admissibility para  []  BHRC .
 The decision in Loizidou v Turkey (Merits) ()  EHRR  in effect distinguished
between competence under general international law and responsibility under the Convention.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
rights protection is to be furthered the fundamental issue is one of

attributing responsibility, to which conceptions as to the location of
violations are only peripherally relevant. The Human Rights Committee,
interpreting the expression ‘individuals subject to its jurisdiction’, has
indeed said that this does not refer to ‘the place where the violation
occurred, but rather to the relationship between the individual and the State
in relation to a violation of any of the rights . . . wherever they occurred’.
There is some authority for the view, expressed in the same case, that
the violation must occur in ‘the legal space’ (espace juridique) of the
Convention or of the contracting states, another conception related to

location, and one which emphasizes the regional character of Convention
protection. One idea is that Convention rights are collectively guaranteed
within the legal space of the Convention, where there can be no areas
which lie outside the protective system, though there may be controversy
as to which particular state is answerable for a particular violation; out-
side this legal space of the Convention there may be responsibility attrib-
utable to a particular state for violations within its particular legal space,
created by the exercise of authority and control. It is unclear where such
an analysis leads, given the fact that the procedures of accountability
under the Convention are not designed to impose any form of collective
responsibility, but only the responsibility of a respondent state. It is true
that the idea of a collective responsibility does underlie the Statute of the
Council of Europe, and it was expressed in the Convention through the
establishment of institutions of the collectivity—the Committee of
Ministers, the Court, and the Commission. But it was not expressed
through the mechanisms whereby complaints of violations can be
made. The introduction of this category of legal space, with its Gallic
title, has not, it seems to us, provided a useful analytical tool with which
to elucidate problems of the territorial reach of the Convention.
Jurisdictional competence, and consequential responsibility, may,
according to the jurisprudence, be extraterritorial. But as the Court
put it in Banković: ‘Article  of the Convention must be considered to
reflect this ordinary and essentially territorial notion of jurisdiction, other
 López Burgos v Uruguay HRC  July , Communication No /, UN Doc
CCPR/C/OP/.
 The concept of legal space is elaborated by E Decaux in ‘Le Territoire des Droits de
L’Homme’, Liber Amicorum Marc-André Eissen () . For discussion see R Wilde, ‘The Legal
Space’ or ‘Espace Juridique’ of the European Convention on Human Rights: Is It Relevant to
Extraterritorial State Action?’ [] EHRLR , Coomans and Kamminga (eds)
(n  above) esp at – (McGoldrick), – (Lawson), – (O’Boyle), – (Cerna), –
(Cassel).
 The earliest decision of the Commission conceding this possibility is X v Federal Republic of
Germany App No / ()  EYHR –. This was approved in Hess v UK App No /
()  EYHR  DR /; Cyprus v Turkey () DR /; X and Y v Switzerland ()
DR /; W v Ireland ()  . Other relevant later cases, in addition to Banković, include
Soering v UK Series No A/, []  EHRR ; Cyprus v Turkey []  EHRR ; X v
UK App No / of  December ; Ilasçu v Moldova and Russia []  EHRR ; Issa v
Turkey App No /,  November .
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
bases of jurisdiction being exceptional and requiring special justification in

the particular circumstances of each case . . . ’ (emphasis added).
To summarize, responsibility may be engaged because the com-
plainant is, ratione personae, within the jurisdiction though, at the rele-
vant time, outside the boundaries of the relevant territory. Or it may be
engaged because the effects of actions taken are capable of impinging
upon that person when outside those boundaries. Or it may be engaged
because the violations of the person’s rights take place on territory
which, though not part of what we will loosely call the territory of the
contracting state, is under its de facto authority or control. To date

the exceptions have been established on a case-by-case basis, without the
benefit of a doctrine providing a coherent foundation for them. If such a
coherence is to be developed in the future it may come to be based upon
the idea that the extent of the duty of a contracting state to secure the
protection of the human rights should not be limited by its legal compe-
tence under general international law, but also be coterminous with its de
facto ability to secure that protection. This idea underlies the decision in
Ilasçu v Moldova and Russia ().
Article  is not, however, the only Article directly relevant to the reach
of the Convention. There was, in the original text, Article (): ‘Any
State may at the time of its ratification or at any time thereafter declare
by notification addressed to the Secretary General of the Council of
Europe that the present Convention shall extend to all or any of the ter-
ritories for whose international relations it is responsible’, and in ():
‘The Convention shall extend to the territory or territories named in the
notification as from the thirtieth day after the receipt of this notification.’
Article () provided for the optional extension of the right of individ-
ual petition at any time to one or more of the territories to which the
Convention itself had been extended.
The related jurisprudence is much less rich than for Article , and rele-
vant scholarly writing is sparse. The same may be said for Article (),
 Banković (n  above) para .

 There is a comprehensive discussion in the judgment of Rix LJ and Forbes J in Al Skeini and
others v Secretary of State for Defence [] EWHC , [] All ER . See also Coomans and
Kamminga (n  above) at ff. (Lawson) and ff. (O’Boyle) and the valuable discussion by
R Wilde, ‘Legal “Black Hole”? Extraterritorial State Action and International Treaty Law and
Political Rights’ ()  Michigan Journal of International Law .  See n  above.
 Renumbered as  since the th Protocol; hereafter we shall use the original number except
when referring to changes made since .  Then optional under Art .
 Thus the fine collection of essays in Coomans and Kamminga (n  above) does not even
mention Art . The jurisprudence is discussed below ‒.

 See, however, by way of exception, Decaux (n  above), and C Tomuschat, ‘Turkey’s
Declaration Under Article  of the European Convention on Human Rights’ in M Novak,

D Steurer, and H Tretter (eds), Progress in the Spirit of Human Rights, Festchrift für Felix Ermacora
() –, cited in Loizidou v Turkey (Preliminary objections)  EHRR  in the individual
dissenting opinion of Judge Gölcüklü. For admissibility see Series A/, ; the reasoning is
indicated by the statement that the acts complained of ‘were carried out by Turkish military forces
stationed in the north part of Cyprus or by forces acting under their authority’. See also the Court’s
opinion, , para .
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
which provided that: ‘The provisions of this Convention shall be applied

in such territories with due regard, however, to local requirements.’
This is also true of the system of optional extension under the broadly
drafted Article  of the First Protocol:
Any High Contracting Party may at the time of signature or ratification or at any
time thereafter communicate to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe
a declaration stating the extent to which it undertakes [une déclaration indiquant la
mesure dans lequelle elle s’engage] that the provisions of the present Protocol shall
apply to such of the territories for the international relations of which it is
responsible as are named therein. [emphasis added]

Any High Contracting Party which has communicated a declaration by virtue
of the preceding paragraph may from time to time communicate a further dec-
laration modifying the terms [une nouvelle déclaration modifiant les termes] of any
former declaration or terminating the application of the provisions of this
Protocol in respect of any territory.
A declaration made in accordance with this article shall be deemed to have
been made in accordance with paragraph  of Article  of the Convention.
And, most importantly, very little attention has been paid in the literature
to the problematic relationship between Article  and the system of
optional extension under Article , and, for the First Protocol, Article .
II. T  T    P       I           
An adequate jurisprudence as to the reach of the Convention needs to

address the relationship between Article  and the system of optional
extension. The jurisdictional provisions need to be considered together.
We start with the text. There are, on the face of things, three radically
different possible analyses of the relationship between Articles  and 
(and Article  of the First Protocol).
According to the first of these, Article  (and Article  of the First
Protocol) are facilitative. They provide the option of extending the pro-
tection required by Article  to the population of territories none of
whom could otherwise be protected, since none would be ‘within the
jurisdiction’ under the governing Article . The effect of a declaration
 This provision was not, as we shall see, a product of pressure from the UK, but from Belgium.
 This interpretation features in one case, Bui Van Thanh v UK () App No /
(Admissibility) DR /. It was rejected in Cyprus v Turkey (n  above). With some diffidence
we think that Decaux (n  above) argues at  that in certain situations the Court, or earlier the
Commission, has to address the interrelationship between Arts  and (); this agrees with our
argument. He goes on, however, to argue that the Court must determine whether one article is to be
disregarded completely (un phénomène d’éclipse) or whether in such cases both articles are to be
applied as operating in a complementary manner (un jeu de substitution) so that, for example, the
jurisdiction referred to in Art  may be acquired, or not acquired, under Art (). The interpre-
tation of the relevant passage in Decaux is complicated by the existence in French legal theory
related to the conflict of laws of a doctrine of substitution ou transposition (see B Audit, Droit
International Privé (rd edn, ) paras –) and Decaux may be drawing an analogy which we
do not understand with this doctrine.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
of extension is, presumably, to bring them ‘within the jurisdiction’ so far

as the Convention is concerned.
A second possible interpretation would treat these provisions primarily
as limiting or restricting the scope of protection required under Article .
They create an exception to it, which may be waived by a Contracting
Party through making an affirmative declaration of extension. A class of
territories whose population, as being ‘within the jurisdiction’, would be
protected under Article , had the Convention not included these pro-
visions, will not be protected unless there has been such a declaration.
Failure to make such a declaration has, somewhat oddly, the effect of oper-

ating as a reservation to Article . The Contracting Party has a free choice
of whether or not to make itself answerable for violations of Convention
rights which are located (however this is understood) in this class of terri-
tories. It comprises territories for whose international relations the
Contracting Party is responsible, but it is problematic what other charac-
teristics such territories must possess for their inhabitants to be excluded
from protection under Article  in the absence of extension. Must they,
for example, be in some sense ‘colonies’, or ‘non-European’, or what?
Obviously not all territories for whose international relations the party is
responsible are covered, since that would include the home or metropoli-
tan territory, and parts of it, and make nonsense of the Convention. An
entertaining if practically insignificant illustration of the complexities is
provided by Rockall, an uninhabited wave-swept rock in the Atlantic,
which the United Kingdom purported to annex on  September 
under a Royal Warrant. Later, by the Island of Rockall Act , it was:
‘incorporated into that part of the United Kingdom known as Scotland in
the District of Harris in the County of Inverness’. Did the Convention
apply to it from  or from ? If only from  could it have been
extended in ? As we shall see a number of European states include
distinct territories with their own special legal regimes.
A third possible interpretation would treat the provisions as having
two functions, as both permitting extension to one class of territories
which would not otherwise be covered, as in the first interpretation, and
as limiting the scope of protection required under Article  in the case of
another class of territories, as in the second interpretation, in the absence
of affirmative extension. Both classes of territory must be territories for
 But not one operating under Art  (now ).

 eg Scotland, or the Isles of Scilly. See also n  above for later Protocols.
 In  Greenpeace activists landed and claimed to have established an independent republic
of Waveland. They and other eccentrics have lived there for short periods. The story and informa-
tion on disputes over the adjacent fishing areas and continental shelf, in which Ireland, Denmark and
Iceland are interested, can be followed in ()  BYIL , ()  BYIL , ()  BYIL
, ()  BYIL –, ()  BYIL , and ()  BYIL –. The Irish folk singers,
the Wolfe Tones, have a spirited and bawdy ballad on the subject, and a Mayor of Dublin (–),
Sean Loftus, by deed poll assumed the name Sean Dublin Bay-Rockall Loftus to signal his concern.
Rockall is indeed closer to Donegal than to Inverness; see his letter in the Donegal Democrat,
 September .
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
whose international relations the Contracting Party was responsible, but

what other characteristics each class must possess appears problematic,
the text of the Convention providing no guidance.
As discussed below, a version of the second interpretation, or possibly
of the third, together with a view as to what these other characteristics
should be, was put forward by the United Kingdom in support of the
inclusion of a colonial clause in the Convention during the negotiations,
and in other international negotiations. But the distinction between the
second and third interpretation was never discussed, for those involved
in the negotiations never, so far as can be told from the Travaux

Préparatoires, appreciated that the text which they had produced could be
interpreted in the three different ways we have here set out.
In the negotiations of the Convention and its First Protocol there was,
no doubt, a loose understanding that Article  was intended to provide for
home or metropolitan territory and Article  to provide for overseas or
dependent territories. Various different expressions were used to mark
the difference. Thus reference was made to ‘colonial territories’ (territoires
coloniaux), ‘metropolitan territory’ (territoire métropolitain), ‘non-
metropolitan’ (non métropolitain), ‘overseas territories’ (territoires d’outre
mer), ‘certain overseas territories’ (certaines territoires d’outre mer),
‘colonial possessions’ (ses possessions coloniales), non-European (non
européens) countries, ‘territories under their jurisdiction’ (des territories
placé sous leur jurisdiction), ‘overseas territories for whose international
relations they are responsible’ (territoires d’outre mer dont ils assurent les
relations internationales), and ‘territories for which it has international
responsibility’ (dont ils assurent les relations internationales). Some of these
expressions had a reasonably clear meaning in the domestic law of partic-
ular states, others did not. Nowhere is there any attempt made to define or
elaborate the terms which were bandied about. We shall later consider
whether state practice or the jurisprudence sheds any light on the matter.
How would our three interpretations have related to UK ‘dependencies’—
this term is used to include all territories not forming part of the United
Kingdom over which legal authority of some kind was exercised—when the
Convention and its First Protocol were negotiated? To investigate the pos-
sibilities we need to attend to the complexities of a world which has largely
vanished, because it was in such a world that the Convention was negotiated.
If we leave out the self-governing dominions, there were then six categories
 See below .  TP VII –, –.  TP I –, TP III –.
 TP VI –.  TP I –, III –, IV –, –, V –, –.
 TP III –, IV –.  TP I –.  TP VI –.
 TP VI –, –.  TP VII –.
 TP IV –, –, V –, –, –. M Wood, ‘TITRE V, Article ’ in L-E Pettiti,
E Decaux, and PH Imbert (eds), La Convention Européene des Droits de L’Homme () ff, com-
menting on Art , contrasts metropolitan territories with des territoires distinct ou sous leur dépen-
dance; again the terminology is unclear.
 The classic work on the Byzantine complexities of the constitutional law of British dependencies
is K Roberts-Wray’s, Commonwealth and Colonial Law (). The author had been Legal Adviser
to the British Colonial Office (–). A new category, that of associated state, was invented
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
of dependent territories conventionally recognized in UK law—colonies,

some of which were categorized as Crown Colonies, ‘British Islands’,
which were not part of the United Kingdom but were not classified as
colonies, protectorates, protected states, trust territories, and ter-
ritories under condominium. In the case of all such dependencies except
condominia the United Kingdom was normally solely responsible for inter-
national relations. The complexities of UK constitutional law in relation
to the various categories was extreme and, to a considerable degree, obscure;
in some instances it was, for example, not settled what the status of a
particular territory was, nor what consequences followed from this.

in  but was short-lived; see M Broderick, ‘Associated Statehood: a New Form of Decolonization’
() ICLQ , and J Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law () esp , , 
n , –, . There were six such states in the Caribbean under the West Indies Act , and
five have since become independent, leaving Anguilla, divided from one of them, as today a British
Overseas Territory (BOT). No case relating to associated states ever arose under the European
Convention. See generally M Igarashi, Associated Statehood in International Law ().
 A Crown Colony was one in which the Crown power to legislate by Order in Council had not
been lost by the irrevocable grant of representative institutions, but the concept is not clear and
Roberts-Wray (n  above) thought it better avoided; see –.
 The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man were not then categorized as Crown Dependencies,
Roberts-Wray (n  above) –, –, –.

 Briefly, a protectorate was in UK law a territory under British protection which was not a pro-
tected state and which did not form part of the dominions of the Crown, not having been acquired
by conquest, cession, or settlement. Put simply a protectorate was not British territory. However, the
UK exercised, so far as UK law was concerned, unlimited jurisdiction in protectorates. See
Crawford (n  above) esp , who distinguishes colonial protectorates, typically African, from
international protectorates, eg in the case of the UK perhaps the British Solomon Islands and the
Maldives; this distinction was not, however, current when the European Convention was under
negotiation. See, however, Crawford, .
 In  under the British Protectorates, Protected States and Protected Persons Order SI
/ those listed were Brunei, the Malay states (Johore, Negri Sembilan, Pahang, Perak, Kedah,
Perlis, Kelantan, Selangor, Tregganu), the Maldive Islands, the Persian Gulf states (Kuwait, Bahrain,
Qatar), the Trucial Sheikdoms of Oman (Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Kalba, Ras el Khaimah, Sharjah,
Umm el Quawain), and the Kingdom of Tonga. This was for the purposes of the British Nationality
Act ; see Roberts-Wray (n  above) , noting changes to the Sheikdoms in  and , and
at – on the Malay states. Zanzibar, though there listed as a protectorate, was probably a protected
state (see Roberts-Wray, , contra Crawford (n  above) , ). For discussion of controversy
over the Gulf states see Crawford, – and literature there cited. See also relevant material in the
UK National Archives (NA) FO / which points out that although Brunei was a protected
state it was commonly treated as if it was a colony or protectorate, because the Sultan was obliged by
the agreement in force to follow the advice of the British High Commissioner except in matters relat-
ing to the Muslim religion or the customs of the Malays. Crawford, at –, argues that the effect of
this arrangement, which dated from , was to alter the status of Brunei to that of an international
protectorate. See generally Oppenheim’s International Law (th edn, ) vol I, – dealing with
‘states under protection’, a category including both protected states and protectorates.
 Trust territories were administered under the trusteeship system of the UN, Art  of the
Charter. At the time of the negotiation of the Convention, South West Africa was still administered
under the earlier system of mandates established under the League of Nations.
 For the Canton and Enderbury Islands condominium with the US, see Roberts-Wray (n 
above) –, , , .

 Even this was not wholly true, since some such territories, such as Southern Rhodesia, did conduct
their own international relations, the power to do so on behalf of the UK being in theory entrusted to
them. Later this became the position over the Central African and West Indies Federations.
 Thus Crawford (n  above) – emphasizes the variety of dependent statuses and the fact
that ‘the legal incidents of a given relation are to be determined not by any inference from the label
attached to it (“protectorate”, “suzerain”, “vassal”, etc.) but from an examination of the constituent
documents and the circumstances of the case’. What follows should be read in the light of this caveat.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
Under the first interpretation, the metropolitan or home territory (how-

ever defined), together with colonies, protectorates, and trust territories
would plainly automatically have been within the scope of the protection
of the Convention under Article , without any need for extension.
Colonies were within the dominions of the Crown, and the United
Kingdom obviously exercised jurisdiction over them. In the case of pro-
tectorates and trust territories, the territories did not form part of the
dominions of the Crown, but the United Kingdom exercised complete juris-
diction over them so far as UK constitutional law was concerned. It would
also be quite implausible to argue that the population of such territories

would not rank as ‘within the jurisdiction’ in international law, so they
would have been covered. In practice, both protectorates and trust terri-
tories were normally administered in the same general way as colonies.
Indeed some British dependencies administered as a single unit comprised
mixtures of territories. This had been the case with the Gold Coast before
independence and was the situation, for example, in the Gambia in .
Under this first interpretation, the position of territories under condo-
minium would be more problematic. In  there were effectively two
such territories, the Canton and Enderbury Islands, under condominium
with the United States since , and the New Hebrides, under condo-
minium with France since . It would be uncertain whether the
inhabitants, insofar as there were any, would be automatically protected
as ‘within the jurisdiction’, and in the case of the Canton and Enderbury
Islands the United States could not, of course, have become a party to
the Convention. If the population of condominia were not automatically
protected under Article  then, conceivably, if implausibly, under the
first interpretation, protection might be voluntarily extended to them on
the basis that the United Kingdom was, with the other power, jointly
responsible for their foreign relations.
What about protected states? Back in  there were many dependen-
cies which probably fell into this category, for example: the Sultanate of
Brunei and the Kingdom of Tonga, the Persian Gulf states and the
Trucial sheikdoms. For their international relations and defence the
United Kingdom was certainly responsible. Protected states had their
own rulers—in the case of Brunei the Sultan in Council, in the case of
Tonga the Monarch, under a constitutional monarchy, and in the case of
the Persian Gulf states their Sheiks or other rulers. They did not form
 Roberts-Wray (n  above) –, . cf Kenya .
 The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was in  in limbo, Egypt having repudiated the agreement
establishing the condominium. Talks were under way on possible independence. See AWB Simpson,
Human Rights and the End of Empire () (hereinafter HREE)  n .
 Roberts-Wray (n  above) –, –, , .
 Hess v UK (n  above) is the only Convention case remotely relevant.
 Roberts-Wray (n  above) –; the status of protected state derived from a treaty of .
Arguably, however, a protectorate; see n  above.

 Roberts-Wray (n  above) , –; the status derives from a treaty of  or one of ,
where, just to confuse us, Tonga was called a protectorate. The UK was entitled to exercise a degree
of jurisdiction over internal affairs
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
part of the dominions of the Crown, and in UK constitutional law they

were certainly not colonies. They were foreign countries, and probably
under the territorial principle of general international law the United
Kingdom did not possess jurisdiction over them. However, in protected
states the United Kingdom might under treaty arrangements, or agree-
ments not constituting treaties, exercise a limited jurisdiction over some
of their inhabitants, typically over British subjects, as in the case of
Brunei since . In Tonga such jurisdiction was somewhat more exten-
sive. The extent varied; there was no uniformity. Furthermore the local
ruler might in practice follow British advice over political issues, or even

be obliged to do so. And the conceptual boundary between protected
states and protectorates (which were also in legal theory foreign countries)
was not clearly defined, so that there could be uncertainty as to which
territories counted as protected states, and which as protectorates. To
complicate things still further territories which were categorized as pro-
tected states could, for some purposes, be treated as protectorates; thus it
was the practice to provide the United Nations with information about
Brunei under Article  (e) of the Charter, as being a ‘non-self-governing’
territory, but not information about Tonga. In protectorates the United
Kingdom exercised plenary jurisdiction, normally under the Foreign
Jurisdiction Act . Under the first interpretation, however elaborated,
the population of protected states would not, in general at least, be within
the scope of the Convention under Article , and the function of
Article  would, under this first interpretation, have been to permit the
extension of the Convention to them. If the issue of whether the popula-
tion of a protected state was ‘within the jurisdiction’ had ever arisen it
might have been treated as dependent on the particular relationship in
question, rather than under some general rule. It never did.
Under the second interpretation, the population of the United
Kingdom’s metropolitan or home territory (however defined), and of
most UK dependencies—colonies, protectorates, and trust territories, and
perhaps British Islands—would automatically have been within the scope
of the protection of the Convention under Article , but the effect of
Article  would be to except such dependencies from protection in the
absence of an affirmative declaration of extension. So whether human
rights obtained in dependencies was up to the colonial power.
According to the third interpretation, the Convention would again
automatically apply to the United Kingdom’s metropolitan or home
territory, however defined, but the system of extension both enabled the
United Kingdom to extend protection to protected states, and perhaps to
 Roberts-Wray (n  above) –, pointing out that the arrangements with the Persian Gulf
states resembled the system of capitulations under the Ottoman Empire. In some there was a
resident British ‘Political Officer’.
 NA FO /; this was the position in Brunei under Art () of the Agreement of
 September , with exceptions for matters relating to the Muslim religion or the customs of the
Malays.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
condominia, but also to exclude other dependencies, for example Crown

Colonies, from a protection which they would otherwise have enjoyed
under Article  (their populations being ‘within the jurisdiction’) by not
making a declaration. It had a choice as to both options. Of course the
United Kingdom, as responsible for the international relations of all its
dependencies, whatever their status, could under general treaty law
accede to international conventions on their behalf, but only to the extent
to which the convention in question permitted this.
It is idle to look in the Travaux Préparatoires or in the National
Archives for any discussion of these three possible interpretations. Nor is

there to be found in the Travaux any analysis of the diverse nature of UK
dependencies, or analyses of what was meant by ‘within the jurisdiction’.
Much less is there any discussion of the fact that other negotiating pow-
ers, which also had overseas dependencies, categorized them in their
domestic constitutional law in their own way, which did not correspond
to the complicated and somewhat disorderly system used in UK law.
III. C               D      
H       A      
Under ordinary principles it is legitimate to use the Travaux Préparatories

as an aid to the interpretation of the Convention, and the Travaux do con-
tain material relevant to the purposes underlying the text of Articles 
and  of the First Protocol.
Four of the states involved in the negotiations, in addition to the United
Kingdom, were colonial powers; their relationship with their dependen-
cies was diverse. This diversity forms an important part of the back-
ground to the drafting history, and helps to explain why the Convention
articles assumed the form they did. Consequently we shall give a very
brief account of it.
The colonial powers were France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and
Denmark. Of the other original members of the Council of Europe,
Norway also exercised governmental control over three overseas terri-
tories which were not conceived to be in any sense colonies. They were the
archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic, which has a settled population of
around , persons of Norwegian, Russian, and Ukrainian ethnicity,
and was at this time, and still is, administered by a Governor appointed
by and responsible to the Polar Department of the Norwegian Minister
 The Convention does not regulate the location of territories in relation to which declarations
of extension may be made, and gives no guidance as to the position over territories under condo-
minium.
 For discussion see HREE (n  above) passim, and earlier G Marston, ‘The United Kingdom’s
Part in the Preparation of the European Convention on Human Rights, ’ ()  ICLQ ,
and K Vasak, ‘The European Convention on Human Rights Beyond the Frontiers of Europe’ ()
 ICLQ , an article whose existence was missed in HREE.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
of Justice. Norway also had sovereignty over Bouvet Island in the

Antarctic, which had and still has no regular inhabitants and is essentially
a nature reserve, and its other territories in Antarctica, Peter I’s Island
and Queen Maud Land, are subject to the Antarctic Treaty, under which
territorial claims are held in abeyance. It also has sovereignty over Jan
Mayen Island in the Arctic, where there is a weather station but no set-
tled population. Svalbard, and Jan Mayen Island are distinct parts of
the Kingdom of Norway, subject to legal regimes which differentiate
them from Norway proper. Bouvet Island is not part of the Kingdom
of Norway, but under current Norwegian legislation, dating from

 February , is an overseas dependency. Italy, though it lost its
colonial empire during the Second World War, became responsible for
the administration of Somalia as a Trust Territory under the United
Nations from  until , but cannot be viewed as a colonial power
during the negotiations.
As we have seen, the United Kingdom’s dependencies fell into a num-
ber of ill-defined categories. Some were in Europe, and close to home
these included the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which had a spe-
cial status; they are today known as Crown Dependencies. These ‘British
Islands’, as they used to be categorized, were never considered to be
colonies. Further away there was Gibraltar, certainly in Western Europe,
a Crown Colony, and further still Cyprus, also a Crown Colony.
There was little uniformity in the arrangements whereby metropolitan
control was exercised over dependencies, or indeed over anything else.
In particular there were very considerable differences in the degree of
local autonomy they enjoyed. Protected states might enjoy a relatively
high degree of autonomy. Other dependencies, such as Crown colonies,
protectorates, and trust territories, varied very considerably in their
degree of progress towards domestic self-government under some form
 Norwegian sovereignty was recognized by the Svalbard Treaty of . Since then there have
been changes. A local Svalbard Council with limited advisory functions was established in , and
became the Svalbard Council in . Since  the capital, Longyearbyen, has become a munici-
pality with an elected council which has limited functions. Information derived from Norwegian
Ministry of Justice and Police website. Svalbard includes certain remote islands, such as Bear Island.
 There has been a Convention case, Boten v Norway (Case ///) relating to an issue
arising on Jan Mayen; the Court noted briefly that it was part of Norway and no issue arose as to the
geographical scope of the Convention. Under normal treaty law the Convention currently applies to
all parts of the Kingdom, whether overseas or not, but not to an overseas dependency such as Bouvet
Island, in relation to which no declaration of extension has ever been made. On Bouvet Island see
()  BYIL – (G Marston).
 Roberts-Wray (n  above) –. See Crawford (n  above) –, –, – for the
development of the conception of colonial enclaves to which arguably special principles apply; this
conception had not been elaborated in the early s.
 Roberts-Wray (n  above) –; Cyprus became independent in .
 Not all dependencies were the concern of the Colonial Office. The Home Office was respon-
sible for the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. Brunei, Southern Rhodesia, and the Maldive
Islands were the concern of the Commonwealth Relations Office. Aden and the Aden Protectorate
were a Colonial Office responsibility, the Persian Gulf states and the Trucial sheikdoms that of the
Foreign Office.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
of representative government. Some were more and some less advanced

politically. But in  all, either on their own or as part of some larger
entity, possessed local governmental institutions—typically a Governor
or equivalent officer appointed by the Crown, an Executive Council,
and a Legislative Council. Legislative Councils could to a greater or
lesser degree be democratically based, though the franchise might be
very restricted. But the ramshackle nature of the British colonial empire
makes all generalization perilous. Thus Cyprus had no Legislative
Council at all, the legislative power being vested in the Governor.
Some overseas dependencies had no settled population; such terri-

tories were administered, insofar as they were administered at all, as
dependencies of territories to which it was administratively convenient to
attach them. Thus until  South Georgia, the South Orkneys, the
South Shetlands, and the South Sandwich Islands, together with parts of
the Antarctic Continent itself, were administered as dependencies of the
Falkland Islands. Other territories, which had settled but tiny popula-
tions, such as Tristan da Cunha, were also administered as dependencies
of other territories, in this case St Helena. Local governmental institu-
tions there were rudimentary. The attachment of such dependencies
could depend solely on customary practice, or might be formalized.
Other territories with tiny populations, such as Pitcairn Island—in the
s the population was around —were distinct colonies, and not
dependencies. Indeed Pitcairn had three uninhabited dependencies of its
own, Henderson, Ducie, and Oeno islands.
The underlying philosophy of British colonialism was that territories
should be governed by local governmental institutions, under loose
supervision from London; there was always a local administration to
which, in practice, government was largely devolved. With some excep-
tions: ‘The fundamental aim is to guide the colonial territories
to responsible self-government within the Commonwealth . . . ’.
Centralization of governmental power in London was something which
was progressively to be diminished. This is not the plan for certain
anomalous dependencies which have evolved in more recent times.
As for other ‘colonial’ powers, each had its own relationship with its
dependencies. For the Netherlands this resembled that of the United
Kingdom, as was to be reflected in the negotiation of the European
 See generally HREE (n  above) –.  Roberts-Wray (n  above) –.

 Thus Letters Patent of  July  and  March  made South Georgia, and the South
Orkneys dependencies of the Falklands.
 Roberts-Wray (n  above) . The population is now around . Obscurity could surround
the name, the location and the very existence of some fragments of empire. On Thompson Island,
never located, see Marston (n  above) , and generally H Stommel, Lost Islands: The Story of
Islands that have Vanished from Nautical Charts ().
 Some, it was thought, would be retained as ‘fortress colonies’, whilst some were thought too
tiny or isolated ever to become independent, though they might achieve independence as part of
some larger entity.  Colonial Office, Colonial Office Handbook  ().
 See Section VI below.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
Convention. The Netherlands had lost its empire in South-East Asia.

In  there remained Dutch New Guinea, given up in , Surinam
(formerly Dutch Guiana), and the six islands of the Dutch Antilles.
There was increasing local autonomy—thus Surinam and the Antilles
became autonomous in domestic affairs in , remaining linked to the
Netherlands under a form of federalism. The Netherlands retained
responsibility for international relations; there was in all probability a
policy of consultation with the local government but we do not have any
detailed information on this. Surinam became independent in .
The philosophy underlying both Belgian and French colonialism was

very different. Belgium’s dependencies comprised the Belgian Congo
and the Trust Territory of Ruanda-Urundi, administered as a single
entity. Under a Colonial Charter of  the Belgian Congo was declared
to be part of Belgium’s national territory. There was a Governor-General
and an appointed consultative Government Council, also provincial gov-
ernors and consultative bodies, so that administration was localized.
Political control was centralized to a degree quite at odds with British
colonial practice. Legislative power was exercised by the Belgian
Parliament, or by Royal Decrees issued on the advice of a central
Colonial Council, whose members were appointed. Policy was in the
hands of the Minister of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. At the
time when the European Convention was being negotiated there was no
plan for developing any degree of autonomy. In the late s policy
changed radically, with schemes to develop local autonomy in the hope
that the territories would remain linked to Belgium. These plans failed,
and the territories were promised independence from June ; they
descended into anarchy.
The relationship between France and its overseas dependencies was
again very different. There were then four categories. The first, com-
prising Algeria and the old colonies were organized as departments, and
administered as parts of metropolitan France. Hence the responsible
minister was the Minister of the Interior. The second comprised what
were known as the ‘overseas territories’, territoires d’outre-mer. They
were mainly African, but included some territories in India, over which
control was being lost in , and some in the Atlantic and Pacific.
The third comprised associated territories, originally under mandates,
but in  trust territories. There was a Minister of the Overseas
Territories responsible for these two categories of territory. The fourth
category comprised associated states, comprising Indo-China, the
responsibility of the Foreign Minister. They broadly corresponded to the
 See n  below and statement of Dr DU Stikker, TP V –.

 SC Easton, The Twilight of European Colonialism: A Political Analysis () ch ; HREE (n
 above) .  Easton (n  above) –.
 ibid ch ; HREE (n  above) ; J Aldrich and J Connell, The Last Colonies () , –
describes the present position.  Those predating the French Revolution.

 Under Indian control from  and ceded to India in .
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
United Kingdom’s protected states. Under the Constitution of the

Fourth Republic the first and second types of territory formed part of
the French Republic, defined as ‘indivisible, secular, democratic and
social’. The other two categories formed part of the French Union.
This had a Consultative Assembly in Paris, and, on paper only, other
institutions. The aspiration was evolution of a single French Union
which would, it was hoped, embrace all France’s dependencies and form
a greater France. Legislative power was centralized in the French
Parliament in Paris; persons from the overseas dependencies participated
to a limited degree by sending representatives to the National Assembly

in Paris. The system changed under the Loi-Cadre of , which made
possible developments not unlike those which came about under British
colonialism, with individual territories enjoying an increasing level of
domestic autonomy.
Denmark in  had one overseas territory which was not in Danish
law part of Denmark—this was Greenland; it became part of Denmark
in . The Faroe Islands were ‘a self-governing community within
the Kingdom of Denmark’, enjoying a high degree of domestic auton-
omy under legislation of . Greenland was to become largely
autonomous under legislation of ; both send representatives to the
Danish Parliament. The Danish government handled international
affairs.
IV. T         E       : C      C   
UK practice, at the time of the negotiation of the European Convention,

was to proceed on the basis that the default rule was that a treaty entered
into by the United Kingdom applied to all territories for whose inter-
national relations it was responsible, rather than merely to territory over
which it exercised sovereignty. What the general rule of customary
 This existed, conceptually at least, from  to .

 For a fuller account see HREE ( n  above) –.  Easton (n  above) –.
 F Harhoff, Rigsfœllesskabet (), English summary at  ff. Under the Constitution of 
June  the Danish Realm was one entity comprising several equated parts, continental Denmark,
including Jutland and the islands of Funen and Zealand, Bornholm and miscellaneous islets, the
Faroe Islands, and Greenland.
 R Lapidoth, Autonomy. Flexible Solutions to Ethnic Conflicts () –, –,  n ,
listing the extensive literature, also F Murray, The EU and Member States. The Special Relationship
under Community Law () –. There is a local legislature, the Løgting, and a government
headed by a Prime Minister. Denmark is represented on the islands by a High Commissioner, and
remains formally responsible for foreign affairs, though there is consultation and Faroese influence—
eg the current Danish claim to the right to exploit the area adjacent to Rockall arose at the instance
of the Faroese government.
 A plebiscite in Greenland over possible independence has been sought. The theory of the rela-
tionship between metropolitan Denmark and the home rule regions is, apparently, disputed.
 A memorandum by DH Anderson of the Foreign Office UN Department of , takes
this view; see NA CO /, DO /, and FO /. Anderson argued in favour of a
different default rule—a treaty would apply to all territories under sole UK territorial sovereignty; this
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
international law was in  was not free from controversy. The default
rule which came to be adopted by Article  of the Vienna Convention on
the Law of Treaties (), was different: that the application of a treaty
extends to ‘the entire territory’ of each party. A deliberate decision was
made to use this expression rather than the earlier favoured Foreign Office
expression ‘all the territory or territories for which the parties are inter-
nationally responsible’ so as not to stir up controversy over colonial clauses.
But this rule only applies when the treaty itself does not expressly or by
implication indicate that the treaty is to have a more limited or wider
application. Furthermore, although there seems to be a general consensus

that the ‘entire territory’ of a state includes overseas dependencies over
which there exists territorial sovereignty, it is not entirely clear that it
includes all or even any protected states. The distinction between
protected states and protectorates, though well established in UK legal
theory, was relatively undeveloped in general international law before
the publication of J Crawford’s monograph, The Creation of States in
International Law, in .
One way of defining or limiting the territorial application of a treaty is
to include a territorial application clause. British negotiators, at the
behest of the Colonial Office, regularly insisted that any human rights
convention should include a special form of such a clause, known as a
colonial clause. The argument for such colonial clauses was presented
as a response to two developments. One was the growing tendency for
multilateral treaties to contain provisions which impinged on domestic
affairs. The other was the changing relationship between the United
Kingdom and its overseas dependencies, under which the latter were, as
a general rule, progressively acquiring a greater degree of domestic
autonomy. Such clauses were included in a wide range of multilateral
treaties before and after the Second World War. So far as Article ()
was supported by Vincent Evans, the Foreign Office Legal Adviser. The Vienna Convention of
 adopts this default rule. See IM Sinclair, The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties
() –.
 See generally Oppenheim’s International Law (n  above) para , –, TO Elias, The
Modern Law of Treaties () –, Sinclair, (n  above) –, A Watts, The International Law
Commission – () vol II,  ff, A Aust, Modern Treaty Law and Practice ()  ff.
For thinking in the Foreign Office not long before the Vienna Convention, see NA FO /
IOC () .
 Oppenheim’s International Law (n  above),  n , noting the practice of the Secretary-
General of the UN in relation to treaties for which the UN is the depositary. The issue is no longer
of practical importance. See below .
 An enlarged second edition was published in .
 Some post-war treaties contained a provision applying the treaty to all non-metropolitan terri-
tories, eg Art  of the Articles of Association of the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (, TS/, Cmnd ). Others, eg the Genocide Convention (), Art ,
and the Refugee Convention (), Art , have colonial clauses similar to Art (). Other treaties
contained no territorial clause, eg the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the
Specialised Agencies of the United Nations (, TS/, Cmnd ); accession by the UK
on  August  made the Convention applicable to the UK’s dependencies. The same is true
of the Charter of the UN. NA CO / has a list of multilateral treaties from  to 
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
and () is concerned the pressure for inclusion came from the United
Kingdom, though with support from the Netherlands. It was made
clear in the European Convention negotiations that, in the absence of an
acceptable colonial clause, the United Kingdom would not sign. France,
Belgium, and Denmark did not press for the inclusion of such a clause.
Article () does not deal with territorial application, but rather with
the manner in which human rights are to be protected. It has an entirely
different history, originating in a Belgian proposal. It was opposed in prin-
ciple by the United Kingdom. Colonial Office policy adopted the ‘equality
principle’: a human rights convention should not include provisions based

on the notion that human rights protection in colonial territories should
differ in substance from protection at home. In this there was a consid-
erable element of hypocrisy, the reality being that the Colonial Office was
consistently opposed to effective human rights protection in the colonies.
The United Kingdom only accepted the Belgian proposal in the final text
by way of compromise.
Colonial clauses could take various forms. The essential requirement
which British negotiators sought was an unqualified option as to whether or
not to extend after signature or accession to its overseas dependencies. The
corollary of this was that in the absence of such extension the Covenant
would not apply to them. There would have been no reason for pressure to
include a colonial clause unless it was assumed by British negotiators that
otherwise the Covenant or Convention would automatically apply to over-
seas dependencies, except perhaps protected states. This assumption is only
compatible with the second or third interpretations. But the position of
protected states was never explicitly considered in the negotiations.
Article () and () satisfied the United Kingdom’s requirement.
Article () provided a further option in relation to the extension of the
right of individual petition which had been made optional under the
original Article . The Colonial Office was adamantly opposed to such
a right and wanted this option in order never to exercise it. Acceptance
of the jurisdiction of the Court was also made optional by Article , but
there was no special colonial clause relating to this option in the original
indicating which contained provisions for compulsory colonial application, which had contracting-
in provisions (ie Arts similar to () and ()), and which had no colonial applications article at
all. See also YL Laing, ‘Colonial and Federal Clauses in U.N. Multilateral Instruments’ ()
 AJIL .
 TP V –, the Netherlands representative, Dr Du Stikker (Netherlands Foreign Minister),
explained that the Netherlands’ relationship with its dependencies resembled that of the UK.
Belgium was prepared to accept the UK’s colonial clause in a spirit of compromise only. For texts
see TP V –. Earlier Denmark and Sweden expressed willingness to support the form of clause
insisted on by the UK but only on the ground that otherwise the UK would not accede. See TP IV
–.  TP III –, –; HREE (n  above) at –, , , –, .
 For discussion see ibid passim, esp –, –, –, –.
 See statement by Ernest Davies, TP V –. See text to n  below.
 For fuller accounts see HREE (n  above) –, –, , –, , , , , ,
–, . See H Blix and TH Emerson (eds), The Treaty Makers’ Handbook () ff for
examples.  This is no longer the case under Art  as amended.
 HREE (n  above) , –, –, –, –, – and passim.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
text of the Convention. Just before the Convention was signed this
was noticed, but in order to avoid controversy nothing was then done
about it.
Especially in relation to conventions of a humanitarian nature insis-
tence upon the inclusion of a colonial applications clause gave rise to acri-
monious controversy, particularly in the United Nations. Anti-colonialists
argued that their real function was to enable colonial powers to withhold
humanitarian protection, and other benefits, from their unfortunate colonial
subjects. British negotiators never argued that human rights protection
was inappropriate in UK dependencies, and politically it was out of the

question for them to have done so. Instead, they relied on a constitutional
convention, mandating consultation with the local government, and exten-
sion only with consent. The importance attached to such conventions was
a peculiar feature of British constitutionalism. And this convention, it was
argued, was desirable as enhancing the degree of local autonomy; indeed
respect for such autonomy represented a step towards the ending of
colonialism.
Given the constitutional convention, if a treaty did not contain a
suitable clause, the United Kingdom would, it was argued, be unable to
ratify until all dependencies to whom the Convention would apply under
the default rule of treaty law had been consulted, and all had given
consent. And if a single dependency did object, the United Kingdom, it
was argued, would never be able to sign or ratify at all. This argument,
it will be noted, assumes that in the absence of such a clause, or at least
a territorial extension provision of some kind, a treaty, once ratified,
would automatically apply to all or most of the overseas dependencies of
the United Kingdom, as under the second or third interpretation. At
no point did British negotiators ever argue that colonial application
clauses were needed to enable extension to protected states, on the
assumption that in the absence of extension they would not be covered
under international treaty law, as under the first and third interpretation.
The position of such states was simply never mentioned.
Colonial clauses were defended by JES Fawcett:
The argument that the protection of human rights, the suppression of the traffic
in women, and the establishment of freedom of information in overseas territories
cannot conceivably be denied, and that they ought to be enforced as soon as
 Under the current Art (), states which have made a declaration of extension under Art ()
may at any time make a declaration in relation to one or more territories accepting the right of indi-
vidual, group, or NGO application to the Court.
 TP VII –. The point was eventually dealt with in an amended Art () under the th
Protocol.
 This feature of the argument seems absurd; it assumes that if, eg, Pitcairn Island held out, the
UK would be unable to ratify a Human Rights Covenant. Unless the treaty mandated application
the problem could surely have been addressed by a declaration accompanying ratification.
 Depending on what the default rule of international law was.
 ‘Treaty Relations of British Overseas Territories’ ()  BYIL –. Fawcett, a Fellow
of All Souls College, Oxford, was an assistant legal adviser in the Foreign Office. He resigned from
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
possible in these territories above all is, at first sight, attractive, but it rests on mis-
conception. It assumes that the United Kingdom will use the clause [ie a Colonial
Clause] to delay or even prevent the application to its overseas territories of
treaties seeking to make these principles effective, but the opposite is the case. As
soon as consultation has taken place and the government of each territory has
made its own decision to participate, the United Kingdom puts in train the
process of accession on behalf of that territory.
Fawcett’s argument, published when he was the Foreign Office assistant
legal adviser based in Washington, does not, however, address the fact
that in the absence of local consent the treaty would not be extended;

thus there never was an extension to the Aden Protectorate, to Hong
Kong, to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), or to Pitcairn
Island. Nor was there extension to two condominia, the New Hebrides
and the Canton and Enderbury Islands. So far as protected states were
concerned there were extensions only to Brunei () and Tonga
(). Nor does it address the fact that in the case of some territories,
for example Hong Kong and Cyprus, the local consent was in reality sim-
ply the consent of a British official, the Governor, since in such terri-
tories government then had no democratic basis. And as we shall see
there are today overseas dependencies of the United Kingdom to which
there has never been a notification of extension. Furthermore the
colonial clause in the First Protocol made possible extreme delay, nearly
thirty years, in extending the Protocol, which was conceived to be an
integral part of the original Convention. Nor did Fawcett address the
argument that if local autonomy generated a decision to oppose human
rights protection it was not obviously deserving of respect.
In  the Foreign Office circulated a memorandum in the United
Nations justifying its policy. This provides an authoritative statement
the Foreign Office on  September . In  he replaced Sir Humphrey Waldock on the
European Commission; see below .
 At .
 This became the Protectorate of South Arabia; at the time when Roberts-Wray was writing
(see –a) it comprised  entities; earlier there had been around . Whether these Sheikdoms
and Sultanates were protected states is discussed by Roberts-Wray (n  above) ; his conclusion is
against this. In  some of the component entities became the Federation of South Arabia. In the
s air control by bombing was still in use in parts of Arabia; see HREE (n  above) –.
 Hong Kong, including the territory leased by China in , was a Crown Colony; see
Roberts-Wray (n  above) –.

 A colony, but treated at the time of the European negotiations as self governing. See Roberts-
Wray (n  above) .

 ibid –. Probably under UK law a protectorate, though treated for some purposes as a pro-
tected state. It became independent as Vanuatu in .

 Roberts-Wray (n  above) . Probably under UK law a colony. Generally see HREE (n 
above) –.
 There is one NA file, FO /, recording an attempt in  by the British Resident in
Bahrain to construct a declaration of rights which the rulers might have been prepared to accept, but
this attempt came to nothing. See HREE (n  above)  n .
 See text following n  below.
 Annex A to Foreign Office Circular  of  October , copy in NA FO /. See
also FO /.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
of the object and purpose of clauses of the type under consideration,

and, therefore, on the purpose of Article () and (). The more impor-
tant passages read:
. A Colonial Application Article in an international convention or agreement is
an Article permitting the power responsible for the international relations of
colonies, protectorates or other territories to apply that agreement individu-
ally or separately to these territories. The general purpose of such a proce-
dure is to enable each of the territorial Governments to decide for itself
whether to accede to the agreement in question and, in the case of an affirma-
tive decision, to enable any necessary legislative changes, required to adapt

local law to the terms of the agreement, to be made before accession is for-
mally made on its behalf.
...
. . . . . it is frequently necessary to enact legislation to give effect locally to obli-
gations embodied in an international agreement . . . it would be undesirable
for the metropolitan Government to force such legislation on them. It is,
therefore, the constitutional practice of the United Kingdom, as part of the
general United Kingdom policy of developing self-government in the terri-
tories for which it is responsible, not to accede to international agreements on
behalf of colonies or other dependent territories without consulting and
securing the agreement of their respective governments.
This memorandum conceded that the United Kingdom could usually
impose required legislation. It went on to argue that the fact that other
colonial powers did not press for such clauses might be explained by dif-
ferences in the relations between such powers and their dependencies. In
the absence of such a clause a dissent from a single dependency would
prevent UK accession completely.
That the United Kingdom’s position verged on the disingenuous was
well known in the Foreign Office, and a minute of  November  by
Alan Dudley, after setting out the standard arguments, continued, with
reference to the United Nations Covenant:
Important but not public reasons for wishing for a Colonial Applications
Clause . . . seem to be
() that a number of colonies cannot be expected to accept the Covenant [ie the
UN Covenant] without reservations;
() that furthermore a reservations article in the Covenant is insufficient to
enable colonial governments to reject the enforcement clauses;
() that colonial governments are particularly afraid of the right of petition.
The facts which underlie this second group of reasons are undoubtedly known to
or suspected by a number of the critics of the Colonial Applications Clause and
 The point was that in the case of protected states the UK might not possess the legal power to
impose its will.

 There were various mechanisms, including legislation by the Imperial Parliament, whereby
the UK government could impose its will. At this time the Foreign Office took the line that legisla-
tion required to implement a treaty should be enacted before ratification.
 He was head of the UN Economic and Social Department in the Foreign Office.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
they do not believe that we want to apply the Human Rights Covenant . . . to our
colonies. There is enough truth in their arguments to make them uncomfortable
to deal with.
The nervousness over a right of individual petition exercisable in
dependencies was principally addressed not by the system of voluntary
extension of the Convention under Article , but by Article , under
which it was always optional.
In the course of the negotiation of the European Convention the
experts considered the applicability of the Convention to overseas ter-
ritories during their first session. At this stage the provisions which

would eventually emerge as part of the First Protocol, including a right
to participate in democratic government, were still being considered as
part of the Convention itself. This generated an embarrassing problem
for colonial powers; there was no way in which such a right could apply
to all dependencies. The Belgian expert, M E de la Vallee Poussin, sub-
mitted an amendment: ‘The rules given above shall be applied within the
overseas territories, in conformity with local needs and the standard of
civilization of the native population, which may not yet have been able to
reach the conditions necessary for the practice of democratic freedom.’
The experts responded with a new Article (d): ‘In the overseas ter-
ritories (les territoires d’outre-mer) the provisions of this Convention shall
be applicable with due regard, however, to local necessities.’ Their
thinking was explained:
Under paragraph (d) the signatory States are permitted to give due regard to
special conditions which may exist in certain overseas territories. It is felt that
the state of civilization of certain overseas territories does not permit the appli-
cation of fundamental rights under the same conditions as for European terri-
tories. The States concerned have, however, to perform the task of bringing
civilization to their overseas territories, a task of which the aim is precisely that
of making the human rights applicable to these territories.
This Belgian proposal became Article (). It was drafted on the
assumption that the Convention would automatically apply to overseas
dependencies, as this explanation makes clear.
The UK proposal was quite different, and relied on a system of vol-
untary extension. Unless there was a colonial clause permitting this the
United Kingdom would be bound to oppose the adoption of the text.
The papers included the text of a model colonial clause. It was, except
in some minor ways, the same as that of Article () and (). There
would, of course, have been no point in British insistence unless it was
assumed that in the absence of such a clause the Convention would apply
 NA FO //US/.  – February .

 HREE (n  above) –.  TP III –, Doc A .  TP III –.
 ibid –.
 Working paper reproduced ibid – from UN Doc A , dated  January .
 TP III –, Doc A . The statement that its authorship was unknown is an error.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
to overseas dependencies (apart perhaps from protected states). Under

pressure from the United Kingdom the draft produced by the experts
included, as Article , a colonial clause:
This Convention shall only apply to territories of the High Contracting Parties
possessing jurisdiction within the fields covered by the present Convention when the
consent of the appropriate authorities of these territories has been obtained.
The High Contracting Parties responsible for these territories shall, if necessary
take steps to obtain this consent.
The Report explained: ‘This article contains the so-called colonial

clause. It was introduced in order to make provisions for the autonomous
powers enjoyed by certain overseas territories, in this matter.’ This
draft text, which did not follow the UK model, appears to rest on a mis-
understanding of the United Kingdom’s position. This was not justified
by the existence of legally autonomous powers (whatever that might
mean) in its overseas dependencies, nor on the governments of depend-
encies possessing, to the exclusion of the home government, jurisdiction.
Its justification was a conventional practice of consultation and extension
only with local consent. The experts, however, had drafted the pro-
vision so as to produce a text which was coherent with Article , and in
doing so had wrongly assumed that provision had to be made to cater for
local autonomous powers or local exclusive jurisdiction.
The experts were also concerned with explicit protection of demo-
cratic rights, which eventually featured in Article . These rights were
then expressly limited to the metropolitan territory (territoire métropolitain);
they were not to apply to some undefined category of non-metropolitan
territories at all. The report does not provide any justification for this.
The explanation is, however, obvious, and would have been embarrassing
to state: colonial government was commonly not democratic. In response
mainly to opposition to their inclusion in the Convention itself from the
United Kingdom the Committee of Ministers decided in November
 to attempt to make provision for the right to education, to property,
and to democratic participation in a protocol. This enabled the denial of
democratic participation to be accommodated in the First Protocol by
the inclusion, as Article , of a colonial clause. Cosmetically this was a
better solution; the right to democratic participation could now be stated
without limitation to metropolitan territories, and the denial of the
right in dependencies could be discreetly achieved by failure to extend.
The United Kingdom, alone among the negotiating states, had indeed
opposed including anything at all on the protection of democratic
institutions.
 TP III – (emphasis added).

 ibid –. Cet article contient la clause dite coloniale. Il a été introduit pour tenir compte de
l’autonomie réservée en la matière á certaines territoires d’outre mer.
 HREE (n  above) –.  These were covered by draft Art .
 TP III –.  HREE (n  above) –.  ibid .
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
The experts met again from  to  March , and the United
Kingdom submitted various changes. In the course of convoluted
negotiations, not fully documented, the experts addressed the question of
the overseas reach of the Convention, and produced two alternative texts,
labelled Variants A and B. Variant B, in its Article , explicitly limits
democratic rights to metropolitan territories, and includes the following
in (b): ‘The provisions of this Convention shall be applied in the over-
seas territories with due regard, however, to local requirements.’ Both
versions contain, as Article ():
This Convention shall only apply to territories of the High Contracting Parties

possessing jurisdiction within the fields covered by the present Convention when
the consent of the appropriate authorities of these territories has been obtained.
The High Contracting Parties responsible for these territories shall, if necessary,
take steps to obtain this consent.
The final Report of the Experts, referring to this colonial clause,
explains that: ‘This article was introduced to make provision for the
political autonomy accorded to certain overseas territories.’ The text is
internally coherent; it is to apply automatically to territories within the
jurisdiction of the signatory state, but where on matters covered by the
Convention the signatory state lacks jurisdiction, because an overseas
dependency possesses it, there must be consent by the overseas territory.
There was no provision for a declaration of extension. Thus the
Convention as a whole was to be based on the idea that responsibility
should follow jurisdiction, and this might rest with the overseas depend-
ency rather than with the parent state. If this was intended to satisfy
the United Kingdom negotiators it was unlikely to do so, since it contin-
ued to reflect a misunderstanding of the British position. The home gov-
ernment did have jurisdiction over its colonial empire, whether or not it
chose to exercise it.
Drafting now passed to a Conference of Senior Officials. The
United Kingdom submitted a colonial clause which was, with minor
changes, to feature in the final text. The UK lawyers made no attempt,
by appropriate drafting, to achieve coherence with the primary rule
based on jurisdiction. It provided for the voluntary extension of the
Convention to overseas dependencies ‘for which it has international
responsibility’, a category which on its face plainly included colonies,
protectorates, and trust territories whose inhabitants were ‘within the
jurisdiction’ under Article , since the United Kingdom possessed legis-
lative, judicial, and administrative power over them. The only type of
 Text at TP III ff.  ibid –.  ibid –.
 Reproduced above as () but now through renumbering Art ().
 TP IV –.
 The texts annexed to the Report as Variants A and A contain the provision on democratic
rights with the limitation to metropolitan territories and the provision quoted above as (d). Variants
B and B do not include these provisions.
 See TP IV ff. for their deliberations.  eg ‘ratification’ replaced ‘accession’.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
British overseas dependency for which the United Kingdom had inter-
national responsibility but most or all of whose inhabitants were,
arguably, not ‘within the jurisdiction’ were those of protected states.
Sense could only be made of the text if the colonial clause was read as
providing an exception to Article , as in the second possible interpreta-
tion, or as providing an exception so far as some territories are concerned
and as conferring a power to extend in the case of other territories, as in
the third interpretation. But the text was not drafted so as to spell this
out. Had an attempt been made to do this it would have been necessary
to specify what sort of territories were to be subject to the optional sys-

tem, and which not, a very difficult task given the diversity amongst
them. Since there was no mention of the special position of protected
states, it is impossible to say whether it was intended to be interpreted in
accordance with the third interpretation.
The Senior Officials presented to the Committee of Ministers a text
containing two alternatives, both now called colonial clauses. One,
numbered (A), simply reproduced the United Kingdom’s text. The
other, numbered (B), read:
() The provisions of this Convention shall be applied in the overseas territories
with due regard, however, to local requirements.
() This Convention shall only apply to territories of the High Contracting
Parties possessing jurisdiction within the fields covered by the present
Convention when the consent of the appropriate authorities of these terri-
tories has been obtained.
() The High Contracting Parties responsible for these territories shall, if nec-
essary, take steps to obtain this consent.
These texts reflect radically conflicting notions of the reach of the
Convention. Under (A) there is a category of territories to which the
Convention does not apply under Article  unless there is an optional
notification of extension. They are ‘territories for whose international
relations the High Contracting Party is responsible’; they do not have to
be ‘overseas’, nor are they defined by reference to their autonomous
jurisdiction. They presumably include protected states. So (A) created
an exception to Article , except perhaps in the case of protected states.
Under (B) the Convention applies to what are called ‘overseas terri-
tories’; there is no system of optional extension by declaration. But there
must be consent when jurisdiction in relation to matters covered by the
Convention rested with the overseas dependency’s government. And the
protection undertaken in overseas territories was to be limited by local
requirements.
 See above text following n .

 eg by building the system of extension into Art  by way of exception.
 TP IV –.  ibid –.  ibid –.
 The provision as to democratic rights with its limitation to metropolitan territories was no
longer included in the draft of the Convention.

 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
The report of the Senior Officials says nothing about the relationship
between Article  and the two versions of Article . Perhaps the prob-
lem was simply not appreciated. So far as relevant it reads:
Art. (A) and (B). Article (A) contains the so called colonial clause pro-
posed by the United Kingdom delegate, whilst Article (B) is a reproduction of
the colonial clause proposed by the Committee of Experts.
The United Kingdom delegate declared that for constitutional reasons his
Government could not accept Alternative B.
Against this the Italian delegate insisted that Alternative B be accepted. In
particular, he pointed out that, with regard to any Convention for the protec-

tion of Human Rights, the benefits of this Convention should extend as far as
possible to all the inhabitants of overseas territories; this was the aim of
Alternative B.
The UK delegate considered that this was also the aim of Alternative A.
The report added that the Danish and Swedish delegates, whilst
reserving the position of their governments, favoured (A) since it was
essential to secure UK adherence. The Netherlands delegate said he
was not opposed to (B) but could not accept paragraph . No reason
was recorded; we surmise that the Netherlands did not wish to accept an
obligation to bring pressure to bear on the governments of its overseas
territories in matters in which they were autonomous. The Belgian and
French delegates favoured (B) in principle, but reserved the position of
their governments. The Norwegian delegate said he could accept (A)
or (B), but reserved the position of his government.
The report and draft Convention was then submitted to the Consultative
Assembly’s Committee on Legal and Administrative questions, which
favoured what it called the more liberal solution in Alternative (B); it
hoped the Ministers would find a way of overcoming the constitutional
objections (ie the British objections) which had been raised.
At the meeting of the Committee of Ministers on  August , the
British representative, Ernest Davies, argued successfully for the inclu-
sion in the draft Convention of the colonial clause submitted by the
United Kingdom. He explained that:
They were not constitutionally able to accept international commitments on
behalf of many of the British Colonies without first consulting and obtaining
the agreement of the Colonial Governments. Therefore they preferred a text
which would permit the United Kingdom to ratify the agreement at once and to
deposit subsequent ratifications on behalf of the Colonies when their agreement
had been obtained. If the text of the Convention made its provisions apply auto-
matically to the Colonies, then the United Kingdom could not ratify until it had
consulted all the Colonial Governments which would be affected, and, if any of
them rejected the Convention, the United Kingdom would be prevented from
ratifying at all.
 TP IV –.  TP V –.

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
He was stating the established Foreign Office view as circulated. By way

of compromise he was also prepared to accept the Belgian ‘local require-
ments’ qualification from (B).
The Belgian Foreign Minister, Paul von Zeeland, reciprocated, being
prepared to accept the United Kingdom’s preferred text, but only in a
spirit of compromise. Belgium never positively advocated a system of
voluntary extension. The reason is obvious enough. The Belgian African
territories were, constitutionally, part of Belgium, and it would be
assumed that they would be covered by the Convention automatically.
For its part, the United Kingdom did not favour the inclusion of such a

provision, because of the Colonial Office’s ‘equality principle’. Thus
at the Ministerial meeting on  August, Denmark had suggested that the
Convention should not be applied at all except to metropolitan terri-
tories; the United Kingdom would have none of this.
The rationale for the Belgian proposal was, as we have seen, the sup-
posedly low state of civilization in at least some non-European territories.
In November  an unnamed Belgian official in charge of colonial
matters explained to a British Embassy official that:
The Belgian authorities fully appreciated the constitutional reasons which led
His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom to desire the inclusion of
[colonial applications clauses]. Constitutional considerations applied with far
less force in the Belgian case. The principal reason why the Belgian Government
favoured the inclusion of Colonial Applications clauses was for the sake of
honesty, since international agreements which made good sense with reference to
metropolitan territories might be quite inapplicable to colonial territories. The
Belgian official then quoted the imaginary case of an international agreement
laying down that everyone should be provided with a gas mask. The provision
of gas masks was reasonable and might even be necessary in Belgium. But to
issue them to pygmies in the remoter forests of the Congo would be difficult and
ridiculous. To subscribe to such an agreement would thus savour of dishonesty
unless the agreement included a Colonial Application clause.
The Foreign Office did not persuade opponents of colonial clauses in
the United Nations to change their position. Although the Ministers
 See ibid –. The Article adopted was then numbered A, and emerged from the delib-
erations of a sub-committee, which had presented the Ministers with three alternative drafts, A,
B, and C (see TP V –). As adopted by the Ministers it was now numbered , and eventu-
ally . It embodied in () the provision put forward by Belgium.
 See n  above and HREE (n  above) –, , , –, .  TP V –.
 He must have had in mind a clause along the lines of Art ().
 NA FO //US /, letter of  November .
 The UK made another attempt in  in relation to the draft Convention on Consent to
Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages, the British delegate repeating
the standard arguments; see E Lauterpacht, The Contemporary Practice of the United Kingdom in the
Field of International Law , I () –, also Oppenheim’s International Law (n  above)
para ,  n . The internal and later history of the matter can be followed in NA FO
/, , , , , FO /, CAB /, FO / (dealing with
Anglo-American talks on the subject), CO /. The International Covenant on Civil and
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
had accepted the UK proposal, the submission of the draft Convention

to the Consultative Assembly provided an opportunity for raising
standard objections to colonial clauses. The clause was criticized by
M Lannung (Denmark), and by M Persico (Italy), who pointed out
that it was of a permissive nature. Extension ought to be mandatory.
It was also criticized by M Silvandre (France). Léopold Sédar
Senghor (France), the distinguished African man of letters and
prominent anti-colonialist from Senegal—he was to become its first
President—tabled an amendment deleting it entirely, and this was
carried by a majority. This only made sense if one assumed that a

Convention without such a clause would apply automatically to overseas
dependencies, in accordance with the second and third possible inter-
pretations which we have set out.
Senghor alone put his finger on the problematic nature of the relation-
ship between Article  and the then :
Je fera d’abord remarquer que cet article  est en contradiction avec le prin-
ciple général de la Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme, et, en particulier, avec
l’article , qui condamne toute discrimination, et avec l’article premier, qui
dispose que ‘les Hautes Parties Contractrantes reconnaissent à toute personne
relevant de leur juridiction les droits et libertés fondamentales des pays définis
au titre I de la présente convention.
If extension was required, this was in contradiction to Article . This was
the more plausible since Article  was not drafted so as to explicitly
provide that it was subject to an exception provided by Article .
A coherent text would, of course, have contained a single article setting
out the substance of both Article  and Article .
The Ministers met again on  November, after officials had met to
tidy up the text, and, principally in response to the view adopted by the
United Kingdom, decided not to accept the decision of the Consultative
Assembly, so that the Convention as signed included the text of this art-
icle as it had been adopted by the Ministers on  August. The United
Kingdom would not have been prepared to sign unless the Convention
contained an acceptable clause, which appeared in the final text as
Political Rights (ICCPR) does not contain such a clause; on ratification in  the UK made a dec-
laration, whose validity in international law is problematic, listing  dependent territories to which
ratification was to apply. There is a comprehensive study of the territorial application of treaties in
FCO / (December ).
 TP V –. For the text of , see ibid –; it included the provision which became
(). The complete text as submitted to the Consultative Assembly is at ibid –.
 ibid –.  ibid –.
 TP VI –, –. See Vasak (n  above) , noting opposition to the colonial clause in
the Assembly of the Union Française in .  Above ‒.

 TP VI –.
 TP VII –, indicating that opposition to the removal of the colonial clause was not limited
to the UK; the reference is probably to the Netherlands.

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
Article (), () and (). The Ministers also decided to postpone
consideration of the rights which ended up in the First Protocol, one of
which was, at this stage, expressly still limited in the draft to metropol-
itan territories.
Senghor’s motion had been to delete the colonial clause completely,
including the Belgian provision, which was plainly objectionable for the
same reasons. But the decision of the Ministers left the Belgian proposal
untouched, and it became Article (). The consequence was that
Article  both provided for the system of optional extension and for the
watering down of the protection of human rights in an undefined class of

territories having some kind of dependent status.
It must be conjectural, but at the time of signature there may well have
been a general understanding that Article  dealt with metropolitan
territories and Article  with colonial territories. But the text of the two
articles does not explicitly distinguish between, or even mention, either
‘metropolitan’ or ‘colonial’ or ‘overseas’ territories. Furthermore the
territories for whose international relations a High Contracting Party was
responsible include its own metropolitan territory, as well as its overseas
dependencies, and what is loosely viewed as the metropolitan territory of
a state can well comprise distinct territories, for example autonomous or
semi-autonomous regions, or the component provinces or cantons of a
federation. The use of the notion of responsibility for international
relations, which was the work of Foreign Office lawyers, represented of
course an attempt to provide a simple formula to cover overseas depend-
encies of various types without being long-winded.
The colonial clause which was adopted in the First Protocol, Article
, differs from that which features in the Convention itself in providing
not simply for declarations of extension, but for declarations ‘stating the
extent to which it undertakes that the provisions of the present Protocol
shall apply to such of the territories for the international relations of
which it is responsible as are named therein’ (emphasis added). Such
declarations could later be modified or terminated. The language used
made it unnecessary to include anything similar to the Belgian provi-
sion, since it permitted the Protocol to be treated like a dish of hors
d’oeuvres, items to be selected freely and even returned to the dish if
they proved unpalatable. A consequence of the inclusion of this widely
drawn text was that it became unnecessary to specify, embarrassingly, as
had been done in earlier drafts, that democratic rights only applied to
metropolitan territories. The original proposal by the United Kingdom
did not use the concept of ‘extent’ and the experts, who met in June
 The hybrid quality of Art  is noted by Wood in a commentary on Art ; see n  above,
arguing that the function of the Article is both the adaptation of the Convention to the degree of
autonomy enjoyed by dependent territories and its adaptation to socio-cultural differences between
metropolitan and non-metropolitan territories.  TP VII –.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
, produced a text which provided that: ‘Any High Contracting Party
which is not in a position to extend the application of one or more of the
foregoing articles to one or more of the territories . . . may make a
declaration to this effect.’ What this permitted was reservations, and
the article appears at first sight to be at odds with the restriction on
reservations in Article  (now ), whose language it echoes by using
the concept of ‘extent’ (mesure). But it is perhaps best viewed as giving
a wider latitude over reservations, but one related only to the First
Protocol. But in July  the form of drafting which was to appear in
the final text was adopted by the experts and in due course by the

Ministers. Such conflict as arose with the Consultative Assembly
related mainly to form, and there was no opposition to the inclusion of
a colonial clause, which was perceptively described by one speaker as
‘the Article which allows the High Contracting Parties to exclude
certain territories from the provisions of the Protocol’. A curiosity
arising from the absence of any provision limiting the applicability of
the Convention to European territories, however defined, together with
the fact that membership of the Council of Europe was a precondition
to accession to the Convention, was that the inhabitants of non-
European territories might lose the protection they had previously
enjoyed as a consequence of extension once the dependency became
independent. There was no discussion in the course of the negotiations
as to what was to happen when independence was achieved. The
British response, after some vacillation, was to incorporate bills of
rights, usually based on the European Convention, in independence
constitutions, or even before, but only if this was agreed.
In the case of Malawi (Nyasaland) a declaration was made in  to
the Secretary General of the United Nations that the new state con-
sidered itself bound by pre-independence multilateral treaties on a
basis of reciprocity until any declaration to the contrary. The idea no
doubt was that Malawi succeeded to the existing obligations of former
Nyasaland. The independence constitution of Malawi, unusually, did
not incorporate human rights protection. In  Dr Banda, who had
taken to detaining his political opponents without trial, as he had been
detained by the British, informed the Council of Europe that it no
longer considered itself bound by the Convention.
 TP VII .  TP VII –, –, –.  ibid –.
 Art .
 For discussion see Vasak (n  above) –, and for UK practice see HREE (n  above)
–.  ibid –.

 ()  European Yearbook of Human Rights (hereinafter EYHR) . For doubts on the
post-independence applicability of the Convention, see M-A Eissen, ‘Malawi and the European
Convention on Human Rights’ ()  BYIL  and the same author’s ‘The Independence of
Malta and the European Convention on Human Rights’ in ()  BYIL –. Malawi became
independent in July .
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
V. U K P           D           E      
        N           
The United Kingdom made its first declaration of extension of the

Convention in . A list was submitted of forty-two territories; this
included colonies, protectorates, one federation, trust territories (for
example Nyasaland and Tanganyika), and protected states (Tonga and
Zanzibar). Some named territories were administrative units; for exam-
ple the named Gold Coast comprised two colonies (Gold Coast and
Ashanti), a protectorate (Northern Territories), and a trust territory

(Togoland). There was no specific reference to dependencies; presum-
ably the intention was to include them. British officials were somewhat
casual in the provision of formal notifications to Strasbourg, most
notably over notices of derogation.
The first list included Cyprus and Gibraltar, both located in Europe,
and the Channel Islands (comprising the Bailiwicks of Jersey and
Guernsey), together with the Isle of Man, again all located in Europe.
So the assumption was that the Convention permitted the denial of
human rights protection even to inhabitants of parts of Europe. The
only occasion on which this extraordinary power has in any way been
questioned in Strasbourg jurisprudence was in the case of Drozd and
Janousek v France and Spain. In the Belgian Parliament, back in
November , Senator Henri Rolin expressed surprise that the United
Kingdom had, by including them in the list, treated Jersey, Guernsey,
Cyprus, and Gibraltar as colonies.
So far as the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, now ‘Crown
Dependencies’, are concerned there had been some uncertainty as to
whether treaties entered into by the United Kingdom automatically
applied to them. However, in  the Foreign Office issued a declaration:
. . . any treaty or international agreement to which His Majesty’s Government
in the United Kingdom may become a party after the date of the present
despatch will not be considered as applying to the Channel Islands or the Isle of
Man by reason only of the fact that it applies to the United Kingdom of Great
 Information may be obtained from the Council of Europe’s website, but this is not in all cases
reliable. Many declarations have been published in EYHR.  (–) I EYHR .
 Including North Borneo and Sarawak, now Sabah.  The Federation of Malaya.
 HREE (n  above) –, , –.
 Alderney, and Sark are in Guernsey, as are Herm and Jethou; there are numerous other
miscellaneous rocks and the like.

 Series A/, Application No /, Judgment of  June  (Judgment, Merits  June
) ()  EHRR . See text to n  below.

 See the report of the debate in the Belgian Senate for  November  (n  below) .
Senator Henri Rolin (–), a distinguished international lawyer, was a Professor of Law at the
University of Brussels. A Senator from  to  he was, from  to , President of the
Senate. He represented Belgium at the San Francisco Conference in  and later on the General
Assembly. He was involved in the European Federal Movement, and very active in the Consultative
Assembly of the Council of Europe, chairing its Legal and Administrative Committee in . See
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
Britain and Northern Ireland, and any signature, ratification acceptance or

accession on behalf of the United Kingdom will not extend to the islands unless
they have been expressly included. For the purposes of any treaty . . . the
Channel Islands and the Isle of Man will, unless the contrary is expressly stated
in each case, be included among the territories for whose international relations
His Majesty’s Government are responsible.
In  the Home Office informed the Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey
that the declaration of  ‘did not change and could not have changed
the rule of international law under which the signature, ratification or
accession to an international agreement is presumed to be in respect not

only of the State itself but of all the territories for whose international
relations it is responsible’. This presumption could, of course, be
rebutted either by a declaration, or by the terms of the treaty, as the
lawyers assumed was the case over the European Convention. The use of
a declaration in  provoked a discussion in the Foreign Office of the
possibility of using declarations, which did not have to be negotiated, to
perform in the future the function of a colonial clause, and thereby
avoid acrimonious disputes. The lawyers, somewhat unconvincingly,
said that such a declaration, made on signature or ratification, would
not enable a treaty to be applied to colonies after initial ratification or
signature.
There were omissions: the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the Aden
Protectorate, Brunei, Hong Kong, the Maldive Islands,
Malta, the Persian Gulf states, Pitcairn, Southern Rhodesia, the
Trucial and Oman Sheikdoms, and the condominium territories of
the New Hebrides and Canton and Enderbury Islands. Some of the
eg TP I –, –, –, –. He became a judge of the European Court of Human Rights
in  and from  was its President.
 Circular No ,  October , reproduced in F de L Bois, A Constitutional History of
Jersey () . It appears from material in NA FO / that the declaration of  was a
response to problems over the extension of ILO Convention  to the Channel Islands, and not to
problems over the European Convention. See also R Plender, ‘The Channel Islands’ Position in
International Law’ (June ) Jersey Law Review .
 Plender ibid , who incorrectly supposes there was a change of policy; the default rule, what-
ever it was, remained unchanged.

 NA FO //US /. The proposal came from non-lawyers, LA Scopes and
AA Dudley; the assistant legal adviser involved was JL Simpson. The possibility of a declaration
which itself provided for later declarations of extension was not considered. On the use of declara-
tions, see also FO /, memorandum of , Aust (n  above) –. See also n  above
on the ICCPR.  See n  above.
 Arguably comprising a number of protected states.  A protected state.
 A Crown Colony to which the Convention was never extended; see n  below.
 A protected state.
 On the then constitutional status of Malta, see Roberts-Wray (n  above) –.
 Which became part of the Central African Federation on the following day; the Convention
was never extended to the Federation, which was dissolved in . Southern Rhodesia, now
Zimbabwe, was by convention treated as if it was a dominion; see Roberts-Wray (n  above)  for
its status as a ‘self-governing colony’.
 Often included in the category the Persian Gulf states.
 With France, which did not ratify the Convention until .  With the US.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
Caribbean islands were not specifically named, but Antigua, Dominica,

Montserrat, St Christopher and Nevis, and the Virgin Islands, were
included within the Leeward Islands, and Grenada, St Lucia and
Tobago within the Windward Islands. The Cayman and Turks and
Caicos Islands were included under Jamaica, since they were then treated
as part of Jamaica. In the case of eleven of the excluded territories, the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the Aden Protectorate, Hong Kong, the
Maldives, Malta, the Persian Gulf states, Pitcairn Island, Southern
Rhodesia, the Trucial Oman sheikdoms and the condominium territories
with France and the United States the Convention was never extended.

Nor was it ever extended to the short-lived Federations of Central
Africa and the West Indies. Brunei was included in . As the
colonial empire was dismantled further lists were submitted from time to
time. Thus one submitted in  removed, in some cases belatedly,
fifteen territories which had achieved independence. The revised list
submitted as covering the period  April  to  May  named
twelve territories, and, as in the case of earlier lists, made no specific
reference to dependencies. A note by the Secretariat published in
the Council of Europe’s website, which is not entirely reliable, is dated
 April  and provides another list. It is the first specifically to
mention dependencies, but only those of St Helena. The practice of
specifically mentioning these dependencies departed from earlier practice.
 At this time a federation, dissolved in . See Roberts-Wray (n  above) –.
 Vasak (n  above)  is not quite correct.
 On the failure to extend to Hong Kong, see HREE (n  above) , –, NA CO /,
FCO /, .

 In the case of R v Seven Named Accused in the Pitcairn Supreme Court (Judgment of  April,
[] PNSC ) the Court, at para , stated that it was accepted by the Crown that ‘UK Human
Rights Legislation, where applicable, and the European Convention on Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms’ is ‘relevant to Pitcairn’. The language is presumably used so as not to draw
attention to the failure to extend. The ICCPR does apply. An appeal to the Privy Council was heard
in July , but at the time of writing no judgment has been delivered.
 –. There were incompatible laws in Southern Rhodesia which the local government was
not prepared to amend. The Convention was extended to Nyasaland (now Malawi) and to Northern
Rhodesia (now Zambia).
 Established in  and dissolved in .
 Declaration  September , ()  EYHR –. On the delay, see HREE (n  above)
. On  April  a letter informed Strasbourg that since  December  the UK was no
longer responsible for its external affairs.
 eg a revised list submitted in  noted that the Gold Coast had become independent in ,
()  EYHR . See also ()  EYHR –, ()  EYHR , ()  EYHR  ()
removing Aden, Mauritius and Swaziland, the former somewhat belatedly.
 Cyprus, Gold Coast, Jamaica, Kenya, Federation of Malaya, Federation of Nigeria, North
Borneo, Sarawak, Singapore, Somaliland, Tanganyika, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, and
Zanzibar.
 Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar,
Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, Montserrat, St Helena, and Turks and Caicos Islands.
 Tristan da Cunha and Ascension, Nightingale, Inaccessible, and Gough Islands. The last three
have no settled population but on Gough Island’s resident mice, currently attacking albatross chicks,
see HREE (n  above) , based on an account by a visiting scientist who told one of the authors
that they attacked him in his sleeping bag. There is a US airbase on Ascension. There is a small
resident civilian population; some members were born on the Island.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
In relation to territories which have been reconstituted since the s,

which are discussed later in this article, it does not include either the
British Antarctic Territory (hereinafter BAT) or the British Indian
Ocean Territory (hereinafter BIOT), though it names the Sovereign
Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus (hereinafter SBAs), in
relation to which a declaration of extension was communicated on  April
, and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (SGSSI).
The position over the last of these territories is a little obscure. The first
explicit extension, we are informed by the Strasbourg Secretariat, was on
 January . But the territory does not appear in a list in the

Yearbook for . Though not named in the current list an entry in
the Yearbook for  appears to assume that the Convention is in force
there. If a formal declaration of extension, naming the territory, is
essential, there remain, astonishingly, British dependencies—the BAT,
the BIOT, and certainly Pitcairn Island, to which the Convention still
does not apply some fifty years after it came into force.
As for the First Protocol, consultation began in November  and
the replies indicated that many colonial governments were likely to
oppose the extension of the whole protocol, or would only be agreeable if
there were reservations. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man were
agreeable to extension, but no action was then taken. One reason for
continued inaction was reluctance to draw attention, through reserva-
tions, to the embarrassing state of affairs in some colonial territories.
No decision was taken; the matter was deliberately allowed to become
dormant. The matter was considered again in , when there was
further consultation; again no action was taken. By December  all
remaining overseas dependencies which had been consulted were agree-
able to extension; those consulted do not appear to have included,
however, the SBAs in Cyprus (), or the BAT (), the BIOT
 See text to nn ff below. The position over the ICCPR (n  above) differs from that under
the ECHR; it has not been accepted for Anguilla, the BAT, the BIOT, or the SBAs, but it has been
for Pitcairn, to which the ECHR does not apply. It was also accepted for Hong Kong. It was accepted
for the Falkland Islands Dependencies and presumably applies to SGSSI. See generally D Harris
and S Joseph (eds), The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and United Kingdom
Law () ch  (McGoldrick and Parker) –. On ratification in  it was accepted for  terri-
tories, of which  remain as BOTs. Insofar as this list excludes certain BOTS, its validity is uncer-
tain. Anguilla and SGSSI did not exist as distinct territories in .
 ()  EYHR .
 ()  EYHR . This may be a mistake or it may have been assumed that the earlier exten-
sion to the Falkland Islands of  April , which did not explicitly name dependencies, still
applied. In  the UK in ratifying the th Protocol declared that it did so on behalf of SGSSI and
the dependencies of St Helena.
 See Wiggins v UK () and Gillow v UK () (n  below), discussed below ‒.
 HREE (n  above) –, based on NA CO / and . There is also a historical
account in NA FCO / and . The failure to act in  was an oversight.
 There were thought to be problems over Art  in Ascension Island, where the Governor of St
Helena was the legislature, and in Tristan da Cunha, for which, although there was an Island
Council with power to issue by-laws, ordinances were made by the Governor without consultation.
There were minor problems over Art .
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
(), the Isle of Man, or Pitcairn, to which the Convention itself had
never been explicitly extended. Further delay was then agreed; legislation
on immigration control was pending, and an application by a number
of East African Asians to the Commission was also pending. Then, on
 February , after over thirty years’ delay, it was extended to ten
dependencies. There remained significant omissions: Hong Kong, the
Falkland Islands, and the Isle of Man, as well as Pitcairn and the BAT,
the BIOT, the SBAs, and the SGSSI. All this is the more lamentable in
view of the fact that the First Protocol was intended to form an integral
part of the original Convention. So for prolonged periods of time the

populations of UK dependencies have been denied Convention protec-
tion, and for some few this remains the position.
Under Articles  and  of the Convention, the optional clauses,
parties had a free choice over the right of individual petition and the
jurisdiction of the Court; UK practice has always been to link the two
options. Far and away the most important option was over individual
petition, and, as might be expected, the British Colonial Office was
adamantly hostile to accepting such a right. For the United Kingdom
itself the optional clauses were first accepted in January , but only
for a period of three years, the Convention expressly permitting accept-
ance for a term. The notification bizarrely excluded responsibility for
anything done or occurring even in the United Kingdom in relation to its
overseas dependencies. Arguably in substance this constituted an
invalid reservation. This was renewed in  for another three years,
but in , and again in , only for two years. In , and again
in , and , the renewal was for five years and in the end, once
the Eleventh Protocol entered into force in , the optional provisions
went, except for dependent territories covered by Article .
The extension of the optional clauses to the overseas dependencies
began in , when they were accepted for two years for sixteen terri-
tories; the notice added that they had also been accepted at the request
 For their anomalous status, see text following n  below.
 See nn  and  below.
 Guernsey and Jersey, Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar,
Montserrat, St Helena and its dependencies, and the Turks and Caicos Islands; there were some reser-
vations, mainly to preserve the practice of corporal punishment. See ()  EYHR –.
 Quark Fishing Ltd v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [] EWCA
Civ ,  April , [] UKHL ,  October . An application has been submitted to
the ECtHR, on which see n  below.
 HREE (n  above) –, –, –, –, –.
 Arts (), (). See ()  EYHR .
 ibid, . The validity of this was never tested at Strasbourg.  ()  EYHR –.
 ()  EYHR –, ()  EYHR –.  ()  EYHR –.
 ()  EYHR –.
 Under Art  as amended. Under the current Art () there is still an option as to extension
of the right of individual petition to a territory to which the Convention has been extended under
Art ().
 ()  EYHR –. They were Guernsey, Bermuda, British Honduras, British Solomon
Islands, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Fiji, Gilbert and Ellice Islands,
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
of the governments of the territories, to five other territories. Near to

home Jersey was missed out; apparently acceptance dated from .
Further away Mauritius, for example, was not included, probably
because it was soon to become independent. Dominica was also missing.
The Isle of Man was included in  but does not appear in the
renewals listed in , though this may simply have been an error.
Acceptance of the optional clauses was renewed in  for two years and
again for two years in , expiring in . In  renewal, which
covered seven territories, was for five years to . There were
significant omissions, in particular Jersey, and the Isle of Man, as well as

the BAT, the BIOT, the SGSSI, and the SBAs. The exclusion of the Isle
of Man from the renewal of  was a response to annoyance over the
proceedings, commenced in , in Tyrer v UK challenging the use of
corporal punishment. The incomplete application of the Convention
is well illustrated by a list published in the Yearbook for . The
Convention was at that time extended to twelve territories, and there
were still omissions. For eight of these the right of individual petition
and acceptance of the court had been extended since . Anguilla had
not joined this list until . The Isle of Man and Jersey had been
included again. Information from the Council of Europe’s website indi-
cates that as of  February  the right of individual petition has been
accepted for eight territories for a five-year period only; in the case of
Jersey, the Isle of Man, and the SBAs the acceptance is now permanent.
The odd men out are the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the
BAT, and the BIOT.
The ability to extend the optional provisions, and in particular the
right of individual petition, for limited periods, could be used in
attempts to influence the Commission or Court to defer to governments
which were displeased with their rulings. That this possibility did not
pass unnoticed can be documented in the case of the United Kingdom in
two papers circulated by the Home Office in  and , the first to
the Cabinet and the second to the Defence and Overseas Policy
Gibraltar, Isle of Man, Montserrat, St Helena, St Vincent, the Seychelles, and the Turks and Caicos
Islands.
 Brunei, Dominica, Grenada, Tonga, and St Lucia. The inconsistent form perhaps arose
because two different officials were involved.

 Jersey is not included in the list for  in ()  EYHR , , but this seems to be a
mistake. See ()  EYHR –, ()  EYHR –.  ()  EYHR , .
 ()  EYHR , ()  EYHR –; the list at this renewal misses Jersey, perhaps
in error.
 Listed as Guernsey, Bermuda, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, St Helena, Tuvalu and St Lucia.
 ()  EYHR ,  ()  EYHR –.  Series A No ,  EHRR .
 ()  EYHR . The territories were now Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands,
Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, Montserrat, St Helena,
and Turks and Caicos Islands. cf ()  EYHR , ()  EYHR , ()  EYHR , and
()  EYHR .
 Anguilla, Bermuda, Falklands, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Montserrat, St Helena and dependencies,
and SGSSI.  CAB / CP () . There was no Cabinet decision.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
Committee of the Cabinet. By this time the Home Office had become
much involved in resisting applications in relation to immigration pol-
icy, to prisoners’ rights, and to alleged misconduct by the security
forces in Northern Ireland.  Acceptance of the right of individual peti-
tion had been renewed in January  for three years, and was due for
renewal in January . The Lord Chancellor wanted to renew for three
years, the Attorney-General preferred two, which the Foreign Office
recommended and this was accepted. It was the Commission, not the
Court, which then excited criticism, particularly because it had indicated
that in the East African Asians case it might find a violation of Article ,

which was thought by Home Office officials to be ‘entirely perverse’. The
Home Office then submitted a paper saying that it was ‘the chief
(although not the only) sufferer at the hands of the Commission’, and
while it had not opposed renewal, suggested that there might have to be
refusal to extend in two years’ time: ‘Unless there is a marked change of
heart by the Commission, or unless the tendency of the Commission
towards developing a new jurisprudence by extending the meaning of the
Convention is corrected by decisions of the European Court, continued
acceptance of these optional articles by the United Kingdom is likely to
bring us neither benefit nor credit.’ The following year another memo-
randum was submitted to the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee.
This complained that: ‘The Commission’s broad and expansive approach
to questions of construction makes it difficult to predict where the
Convention will bite next.’ After conceding that refusal to renew would
lead to an outcry from ‘the human rights lobby’ and would damage
Britain’s international reputation, renewal for a mere two years would
signal concern. Informal contacts with the Secretariat indicated that
there might be other governments also concerned; they should be
approached: ‘The objective should be, in the long term, to bring about a
more conservative approach by members of the Commission to questions
 CAB / DOP () . See also on what follows, FCO /.
 Between  and  a number of East African persons of Asian ethnicity sought protec-
tion in the UK against the discriminatory policies adopted by Kenya and Uganda; litigation raised
the question of whether the Commonwealth Immigrants Act , s  violated the Convention. For
an account by Lord Lester, their leading counsel, see ‘Thirty Years On: the East African Case
Revisited’ [] Public Law . See also ()  EYHR  and NA FCO /, , , ,
, , FCO /, HO /. For the report of the Commission, see -A DR  ().
 This gave rise to the decisions in Golder v UK Series A/, ()  EHRR , which went
against the UK. There had been many more applications by prisoners, and there are many papers
available in NA.
 Republic of Ireland v UK Series A/, ()  EHRR , . There are many papers in NA.
 Two files from the Lord Chancellor’s Department on objections to accepting the optional
clauses, NA LCO / and , covering this issue from  to , have been lost.
 Memorandum by Vincent Evans of  January  in NA FCO /. There were also
memoranda by Sir Thomas Brimelow and Lord Bridges which we have not located; these argued
that it would be premature not to renew until the pending cases had been concluded and the system
given a fair trial.
 CAB / DOP () , also PREM /. By now the Handyside case ( EHRR )
was pending.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
of interpretation . . . . ’ This could, perhaps, be brought about by more

suitable appointments to membership of the Commission. What steps
were actually taken is not documented. But in  the Danish inter-
national lawyer Max Sørensen did not stand for re-election as President of
the Commission, and the former Foreign Office lawyer, James Fawcett,
was elected President; what lobbying went on behind the scenes cannot
be established. The general dissatisfaction, which was no doubt aired in
discussions with the Commission which took place over the East African
Asians case, and the Golder case, in   provides the background to
the unsuccessful efforts made by Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, former Legal

Adviser to the Foreign Office, to persuade the Court in the cases of
Golder v UK () and Tyrer v UK (), to adopt a more
restrained attitude to interpretation. It failed.
Under the provisions of the Eleventh Protocol, which abolished the
Commission, acceptance of the jurisdiction of the Court ceased to be
optional, and under Article  the right of individual petition is no longer
optional except in relation to territories to which the Convention has been
extended under what is now Article . The amended Convention does
not explicitly provide for this option to be exercised only for a term, but
we are informed by the Secretariat that the United Kingdom has contin-
ued to follow its earlier practice; thus the right of individual petition was
extended to the SGSSI for five years from  January . So far as the
First Protocol is concerned Article , taken literally, permits parties to do
more or less anything they want, and there is no jurisprudence on the
meaning of ‘extent’.
VI. N     A       F     
O       D       
Since the Convention came into force the United Kingdom had estab-
lished a number of distinct new overseas dependent territories, the exis-
tence of which we have already mentioned. These were not the result of
the acquisition of new territory, but were created by making rearrange-
ments to existing territories. Difficult questions arise as to the applica-
bility of the Convention and its First Protocol to these new entities.
 There was also a suggestion for an amendment which would enable a respondent government
to challenge a decision on admissibility in the Court, before the Commission started to engage in its
protracted and, it was thought, damaging fact-finding activities.
 Documented in ()  EYHR .
 –, Judge of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) –, Judge of the European
Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) –. For discussion of Fitzmaurice’s views on interpretation,
see R Jennings, ‘Gerald Gray Fitzmaurice’ ()  BYIL , –.
 Series A/,  EHRR , .  Series A/,  EHRR .  Art ().
 In  a government White Paper, Partnership for Progress and Prosperity. Britain and the
Overseas Territories (Cm , hereinafter PPP) was published which gave an account of the vari-
ous territories and their governmental systems, called ‘profiles’, in its Appendix I. This misses out
the SBAs, though the territory is included in the list of BOTs at para . and mentioned elsewhere
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
When Cyprus became independent in  sovereignty was retained

over two bases and surrounding land. The Cyprus Act, having provided
that the Republic of Cyprus would comprise the whole island, went on
to provide that ‘nothing in the foregoing section shall affect Her
Majesty’s sovereignty and jurisdiction over [the air bases of Akrotiri and
Dhekhelia]’. At this time the European Convention, but not its First
Protocol or the optional clauses, had been extended to Cyprus. There was
never an explicit denunciation of the Convention with regard to the
SBAs, though in  Strasbourg was informed that since  the
United Kingdom was no longer responsible for the international rela-

tions of Cyprus, a statement which obviously could not apply to the
SBAs for whose international relations the United Kingdom clearly
remained responsible. Arguably the European Convention continued to
apply there. As being the remnant of the Crown colony of Cyprus, which
was annexed on  November , the status of the territory is, arguably,
that of a colony. However, a ministerial statement of  February 
explained that it was not the intention to set up and administer ‘colonies’
on the Island of Cyprus. There is an Administrator on the spot, with
power to make laws for the ‘peace, order and good government’ of the
territory; he is always a serving military officer. There is no Governor,
and there is no Legislative nor Executive Council, nor democratic insti-
tutions, though there is an Advisory Board. The Crown retains its con-
stituent and legislative powers under the prerogative, and the territory is
of course subject to the legislative power of the UK Parliament. The
Secretary of State has a power to disallow any laws made by the
Administrator. There are courts with an ultimate appeal to the Privy
Council. The territory, which has a considerable but largely transient
population of service personnel and their families, is in practice run by
the Ministry of Defence in London, with service personnel in the terri-
tory subject to military law. There are also resident Greek Cypriots and
access for those not living there, and a transient population of tourists.
There is no policy under which the territory is in the fullness of time to
become an independent country within the Commonwealth. If the bases
became redundant for strategic purposes sovereignty would be relin-
quished in favour of the Government of the Republic of Cyprus, and
undertakings have been given to this effect. As late as June  it was
the United Kingdom’s position that it would be ‘inappropriate’ to extend
in the document. See also UN Doc CCPR/C/UKOT//, the UK Report of  to the Human
Rights Committee.
 Cyprus Act , s ()(a). Also SI /, , SI /, SI  III,  (Royal
Instructions).
 This is the view taken in Lord Mackay of Clashfern (ed), Halsbury’s Laws of England (th edn,
 reissue) vol VI, para  (hereinafter Halsbury).

 HC Debs vol , col – ( January ).
 The judges hold office at Her Majesty’s pleasure. See Halsbury (n  above) vol VI, para .
 There is information on the official website managed by the Ministry of Defence.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
the Convention, but this was done on  May  on a permanent

basis. For over forty years its writ, arguably at least, did not run there.
The BAT was created in  and comprises the South Orkneys, the
South Shetlands, Graham Land and the adjoining mainland; the ter-
ritory lies south of latitude ° S and is bounded by longitudes ° W
and ° W. It was established in response to the Antarctic Treaty
. Its population is wholly transient, but permanent bases have
been established. Before  these territories were dependencies of the
Falkland Islands; there were conflicting claims to some parts, but these
are currently suspended. There was a High Commissioner, appointed by

the Crown, who may appoint a deputy. He has legislative powers under
the usual formula, subject to disallowance; he also has executive powers.
There is no legislative or executive council, and no democratic institu-
tions. There is no policy under which the territory may, at some uncer-
tain date in the future, become a self-governing state within, or if the
inhabitants so choose, outside the Commonwealth, nor could there be. In
practice the Governor of the Falkland Islands administered the territory
until , when the practice developed of a Foreign and Commonwealth
Office Official, resident in London, being appointed. The BAT has a
Supreme Court and Court of Appeal; this has the same personnel and
the same location as the courts of the Falkland Islands. There are a num-
ber of scientific stations, and individuals actually present there act as
magistrates. Arguably it ranks as a Crown Colony. The European
Convention (but not the right of individual petition) was extended to the
Falkland Islands in , and the right of individual petition and accept-
ance of the court in  initially for two years; this was later renewed.
No formal action has been taken by the United Kingdom to terminate its
application to the territory on or after its separation from the Falklands.
It has, however, never been included in one of the lists submitted by the
United Kingdom. Although its population is transient there is no reason
in principle why the rights protected under the Convention and its First
Protocol should not be secured there, though the absence of lawyers
might cause a slight problem under Article , and elections there for a
local legislature, as distinct from postal voting in UK elections, would
make no sense.
The SGSSI were, before , dependencies of the Falkland Islands,
and were separated from other Antarctic territories when the BAT was
 HC Debs vol , col  W, noted ()  BYIL .
 Council of Europe website.
 The boundaries are defined in the British Antarctic Territory Order in Council , SI
/, SI  I,  (Royal Instructions). See now SI /, s . See generally Halsbury
(n  above) vol , para . For a ‘profile’ see PPP (n  above) , and for history Roberts-Wray
(n  above) –.
 (TS No  , Cmnd ). See E Lauterpacht, The Contemporary Practice of the U.K. in
the Field of International Law () vol I, –.

 The judges hold office at Her Majesty’s pleasure. See Halsbury (n  above) vol VI, para .
 The boundaries of the BAT defined by coordinates differ somewhat from those of the territory
when it was a dependency of the Falklands, settled by Letters Patent in .

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
established in . They have only a transient population. There is

a Commissioner, who is in practice the Governor of the Falkland
Islands, with a power to legislate by ordinance for peace, order, and
good governance; an Annex to the Statutory Instrument lists
reserved subjects on which there must be prior consent from the
Secretary of State. The Commissioner is under the control in defence
and security matters of the officer commanding British forces in the
South Atlantic. The First Secretary in the Falkland Islands administra-
tion performs similar functions for the territory. There is no legislative
or executive council, and there are no democratic institutions. There is

a power to establish courts or to confer jurisdiction on courts in other
territories; in effect this means that the courts of the Falkland Islands
do duty for the SGSSI. Thus the Senior Magistrate from the
Falklands presides over the magistrates’ court, and there is a court of
summary jurisdiction. The Crown can legislate for the territory by
Order in Council and it is subject to the legislative power of the UK
Parliament. The ultimate Court of Appeal is the Privy Council in
London. Its status is the same as that of the BAT. When the territory
was a dependency of the Falkland Islands the European Convention
presumably applied there. In the Council of Europe’s website the terri-
tory is currently included in a list of territories to which the Convention
applies; the Convention was explicitly extended in  and the right of
individual petition for five years. This has been renewed for a further
period of five years from  January . The First Protocol has not
formally been extended.
The BIOT was formed in  by separating the islands of the
Chagos Archipelago from the dependencies of Mauritius, which was then
a Crown Colony, and certain other islands from the dependencies of
the Seychelles, at that time also a Crown Colony. Mauritius became
independent in  and the Seychelles in ; the islands separated
from the Seychelles were restored when it became independent. The
reason was to enable the United States to establish a military base; in due
course it was constructed on Diego Garcia. Some of the Chagos
Islands, including Diego Garcia, had a long-settled population, compris-
ing persons of African ethnicity, descendants of freed slaves; they were
 See Halsbury (n  above) vol VI, para , SI /. See PPP (n  above)  for a ‘pro-
file’ and R (Quark Fishing Ltd v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs []
EWCA Civ ,  April , [] UKHL ; See n  below.
 He must consult the Executive Council of the Falklands when exercising any function which
might affect those islands.  Also SI /.

 See Halsbury (n  above) vol VI, para , SI /, amended /, revoked by the
British Indian Ocean Territory Order , SI / and Royal Instructions of  November
 (SI  III, ) and SI  III,  and SI /, and generally Halsbury (above)
vol VI, para .
 The Farquhar Islands, those of the Aldabra group, and the Island of Desroches.
 The agreement with the US over the base was settled by an exchange of notes in , ,
and , published in the UK Treaty Series as No  () Cmnd , No  () Cmnd ,
and No  () Cm . See Crawford (n  above)  n .
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
known as the Ilois. To satisfy the wishes of the US military, between

about  and  this population was unlawfully expelled from the
islands. The invention of the BIOT was thus directly related to the
violation of the human rights of its indigenous inhabitants; it was
invented with a view to violating those rights. This expulsion has given
rise to litigation in the UK courts, and an application to Strasbourg
under the European Convention is currently pending. The base was
established under an agreement with the United Kingdom, and the
population of the territory is now transient, comprising military person-
nel, civilian contractors and their employees, scientists, some visiting

yachtsmen and fishermen, and a tiny number of British officials. There
is a Commissioner appointed by the Crown by instructions issued by the
Secretary of State, who enjoys legislative powers; in practice this office is
held by an official of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office located in
London. This is also the case with the Administrator. There is a system
of courts, the judges being non-resident, though there is a locally resi-
dent magistrate and a few police officers. There is an ultimate appeal to
the Privy Council. The courts in the United Kingdom have exercised
jurisdiction over the BIOT in a number of recently litigated cases.
There are no democratic institutions whatsoever and there is no policy
under which the BIOT could in the fullness of time become a self-
governing state either within or without the Commonwealth. An under-
taking has been given to return the territory to Mauritius, which claims
it, if it ever ceases to be needed for defence purposes. No consultation
ever took place with the Chagossians. Currently there are no plans to
allow them to return. The European Convention, but not the right of
 The expression, which just means ‘the islanders’ acquired offensive overtones in Mauritius,
and they now prefer to be called the Chagossians or Chagos Islanders.

 PPP (n  above)  glosses over the expulsion, which involved around , persons. There
were also migrant workers who were evacuated.

 See in particular R v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, ex p Bancoult
[] QB , No ; Chagos Islanders v Attorney-General [] EWHC , decision of Ousely
J, leave to appeal refused. Litigation brought in the UK by one Michel Vencatassen, in , led to a
settlement which provided some compensation for some Chagossians. See now R (ex p Bancoult) v
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [] EWHC  (Admin) CO//
of  May  where it was held in judicial review proceedings that an Order in Council which had
the effect of making it a criminal offence for a Chagossian to be present in the BIOT without a per-
mit (which would never be granted) was irrational and therefore without legal effect. The UK gov-
ernment’s appeal against this decision is pending.
 Judges hold office at pleasure and can be dismissed by the Commissioner.
 Most importantly R v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, ex p Bancoult
(n  above). This held that the Immigration Ordinance expelling the local inhabitants was unlaw-
ful. An attempt by the UK government to render this nugatory by an Order in Council has recently
been held to have been invalid; see n  above.
 PPP (n  above) . The US base is not held under a lease with a fixed determination. Under
the agreement of , which relates to the entire Chagos archipelago, review is possible up to ,
and unless a decision is taken to terminate, the arrangement will continue for a further  years.
 The UK is, or at least was, apparently agreeable but the US government is not; see HL Deb
vol , col ,  January . Under the  UK-US agreement, consultation is required if
persons not explicitly identified in the agreement are admitted to the BIOT. In April  a short
visit was permitted.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
individual petition, was extended to both Mauritius and the Seychelles in

, and after they became independent Strasbourg was informed
that the United Kingdom was no longer responsible for their inter-
national relations. As in the case of the SBAs, this statement could not
apply to the territories comprised in the BIOT, and there was never any
denunciation of the Convention in relation to the BIOT. But, as in the
case of the BAT, but not in that of the SGSSI or SBAs, there has never
been an explicit declaration of extension to the BIOT as such.
The SBAs, the BAT, the SGSSI, and the BIOT are all today, since the
British Overseas Territories Act , officially called British Overseas

Territories (BOTs); the SBAs and the BIOT today fall into the category
of colonial enclaves, to be handed back to Cyprus and Mauritius if they
become redundant for military purposes. In terms of traditional categories
they are Crown Colonies, originally acquired respectively by conquest
or cession, or annexation (SBAs), by annexation or discovery (BAT
and SGSSI), and by cession (BIOT). But they do not conform to
the old model of a colony or to the current model of a BOT. In an ami-
cus brief submitted by the United Kingdom Government in  to the
Supreme Court of the United States an account was given of the nor-
mal governmental structure of dependent territories: ‘The Constitutions
of the Dependent Territories are set out in United Kingdom legisla-
tion. The Constitutions of the Dependent Territories contain, among
other matters, provision with regard to the office of Governor, the
Executive and the Legislature.’ This brief listed the BAT, the BIOT,
the SBAs, and the SGSSI as dependent territories in a footnote, but
nothing in the passage quoted, and virtually nothing in the rest of the
brief, has any application to them. Again in the Government White
Paper of , Partnership for Progress and Prosperity, the Government
set out its commitment to ‘A new partnership—the new way forward’
which was to be:
. . . based on four fundamental principles:
self-determination;
mutual obligations and responsibilities;
freedom for the territories to run their own affairs to the greatest degree
possible;
a firm commitment from the UK to help the territories develop economically
and to assist them in emergencies.
Only the fourth principle could possibly be applied to the four territories
under discussion, and indeed much else in the paper—for example the
 Both were included in lists submitted in  and .
 The letter relating to Mauritius was submitted in , that relating to the Seychelles in .
 Roberts-Wray (n  above) ; the island was under British administration before it was
annexed in ; annexation was recognized by the Treaty of Lausanne ().

 Roberts-Wray (n  above) . Although there is a long history of occupation of particular
sites, it would be implausible to call them settled territories.

 Roberts-Wray (n  above) –.  ()  BYIL .  para ..
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
emphasis on the importance of consultation to establish the wish of the

local inhabitants to remain associated with Britain—has never been
applied to them. Nobody asked the Chagossians what their wishes
were before they were expelled; they were simply and cruelly made to
leave, and their pet dogs, for good measure, were gassed or burnt alive by
way of example. And nobody asks the Greek Cypriots living in the SBAs
what their wishes are, a process which would be objected to by Cyprus if
attempted. The idea of asking the temporary inhabitants of the other ter-
ritories is absurd.
So nothing whatever is gained by lumping these four territories into a

class of BOTs as if they were in like case with, for example, the British
Virgin Islands, which have a resident population of around , per-
sons, a ministerial system of Government with an Executive Council,
presided over by the Governor, a Legislative Council of thirteen elected
members, and a large degree of local autonomy. Although old cate-
gories, and the modern blanket category of BOT have their uses, it
seems more realistic to treat these territories as falling into a new cate-
gory of their own. Gerald L Neuman has used the term ‘anomalous
zones’ to characterize certain overseas territories of the United States,
which are, like the four British territories, neither fish nor fowl. We
need, for analytical purposes, some similar conception to mark the dif-
ference between them and regular colonies or overseas dependencies.
The basic characteristics of the four territories are that they have neither
a settled population, in one case because of illegal expulsion, nor even
rudimentary democratic institutions. Furthermore their administra-
tions, for it is misleading to call them governments, enjoy only a trivial
measure of autonomy. They are not on a high road to independence, nor
is their future affected in the least by the wishes of their inhabitants.
They are better called British non-autonomous overseas territories
(BNOTs), or given some similar title to mark their peculiar status. En
passant one other territory, currently classified as a dependency of
another BOT, St Helena, falls naturally into the same category; this is
Ascension Island, which had no indigenous population. The island is
primarily used as the home of a US military base under agreements of
 and . The Governor of St Helena has executive and legislative
authority; there is a resident Administrator appointed by him. Since
 there has been an elected Island Council with consultative and
advisory functions.
 See para . and passim.  PPP (n  above) .
 He deals with territories which have permanent populations, not with those without, such as
Wake Island. See GL Neuman, ‘Constitutionalism and Individual Rights in the Territories’ in CD
Burnett and B Marshall (eds), Foreign in a Domestic Sense. Puerto Rico, American Expansion and the
Constitution () .
 Tristan da Cunha is also a dependency of St Helena, but it enjoys rudimentary democratic
institutions (see PPP (n  above) ).

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
VII. T  P         O    M       
   C        E   
The Netherlands and Denmark, among the other original negotiating

parties, are the only states which have made declarations of extension
under Article (). The Netherlands did so in  in relation to
Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles. Denmark also made a declara-
tion in the same year with regard to Greenland both in relation to the
Convention and to its First Protocol, and accepted the right of individual
petition for Greenland.

France did not ratify the Convention until May , and its instru-
ment of ratification was stated to apply ‘to the whole territory of the
Republic, having due regard, where the overseas territories (les territoires
d’outre-mer) are concerned, to local requirements, as mentioned in Article
’. This applied to the First Protocol as well.
Belgium ratified the Convention and its First Protocol on  June
, making the following declaration: ‘En déposant cet instrument . .
. le Représentant a.i de Belgique a déclaré qu’au cas où son
Gouvernment ferait dans l’avenir, en vertu de l’article  de la Convention,
une déclaration étendant l’application de la Convention à un territoire dont
la Belgique assure les relations internationales, le Gouvernment Belge
pourrait faire accompagner cette déclaration de réserves imposées par les
nécessités locales.’ This declaration, which could only refer to Belgium’s
African territories, clearly assumes that in the absence of a declaration of
extension the Covenant and First Protocol would not apply.
Belgium, as we have seen, never supported the system of voluntary
extension, but in the end went along with it by way of compromise.
The thinking behind this declaration must have been that since the
Convention now embodied such a system, its effect was to exclude the
African territories from protection unless such a declaration was made, a
view compatible with the second or third possible interpretations.
Belgium never did make any declaration of extension.
The only other party to the Convention which has ever made a declar-
ation of extension is West Germany, which on ratifying in  declared
 (–)  EYHR –, with a reservation to Art (), withdrawn in ; see () 
EYHR . A further declaration was made in  explaining that Aruba had acquired internal auton-
omy within the Kingdom of the Netherlands and no longer formed part of the Netherlands Antilles,
without this affecting the application of international treaties. A note by the Secretariat on the
website notes that the Convention no longer applies to Surinam since it became independent on
 November .  (–)  EYHR .
 Under the then Belgian Constitution, Art , § the King concludes treaties, but, under a
dualist system: ‘Ces traits n’ont d’effet qu’après avoir reçu l’assentiment des Chambres’. This assent
was given by a law of  May . For the ‘Exposé des Motifs’ presented by Paul van Zeeland,
Minister of Foreign Affairs, see Documents parlementaires Sénat Session –, III, – and
Séance du  Mai , Annales parlementaires Sénat,  mars– juillet , .
 Ad interim.  (–)  EYHR .
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
that: ‘The territory to which the Convention shall apply extends also to
Western Berlin.’ This declaration covered the period  September 
to  October . Western Berlin was not part of the Federal
Republic, and was at this time still under occupation, though permitted
by the Western powers a considerable degree of autonomy. Under an
exchange of notes, the Federal Republic was, from , permitted to
extend international agreements to it, ‘provided that this is not precluded
by the nature of the agreements concerned’. Italy, though as we have
seen responsible for the administration of Somalia from  to ,
never made such a declaration. The reason may have been the fact that

there was UN supervision.
VIII. T  J           
There have been only twelve cases which appear to be relevant to the
subject matter of this article, though none of these cases provides a fully
elaborated view of the relationship between Article  of the Convention
and the system of voluntary extension provided for by Article  and
Article  of the First Protocol. In part, the explanation for this some-
what disappointing phenomenon lies in the way in which the complaints
came up for decision, which did not call for elaboration. Four of the
twelve cases came only before the Commission, and only one has come
before the Grand Chamber.
The first of these cases was X and others v Belgium (), which
came only before the Commission. An application was brought by three
Belgian nationals and a company, in which two of the applicants appear
to have been shareholders, to seek redress for loss of property suffered as
a consequence of the collapse of the Belgian administration in the Congo
and Ruanda-Urundi, and the granting of independence, which took
 Information from Council of Europe website. The Federal Republic of Germany was estab-
lished in , and became an independent sovereign state in .

 US Department of State, Documents on Germany – –. See ID Henry and MC
Wood, The Legal Status of Berlin () –, –. Crawford (n  above) –. The
ICCPR was also declared by the Federal Republic in  to apply to West Berlin.
 X and Others v Belgium (App No /) (Admissibility) ()  EYHR –, Cyprus v
Turkey () DR /, Wiggins v UK () (Admissibility) DR /, Tyrer v UK (Judgment,

Merits) ()  EHRR , Gillow v UK Series A/, ()  EHRR , Loizidou v Turkey
(Preliminary objections) ()  EHRR , Drozd and Janosek v France and Spain (Judgment,
Merits) Series A/, ()  EHRR () , Mathews v UK (App No /) (Judgment
Merits)  February , ()  EHRR , Bui Van Thanh and others v UK (App No /)
(Admissibility) DR /, Yonghong v Portugal () Judgment of  November  Series No IX
, Ilasçu and others v Moldova and Russia (App No /) (Admissibility decision of  July )
(Merits) ()  EHRR  (both Grand Chamber), Affaire Py v France (App No /) 
January . The East African Asians Case (Application of East African Asians v UK) (Admissibility)
 October , did not raise any issue over Art ; jurisdiction over the  applications which were
treated as a test case depended either on their possession of UK passports or on their presence in the
UK. There was no dispute over the competence of the Commission to entertain the applications.
 (App No /) (Admissibility) ()  EYHR –.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
effect on  July . In addition they claimed nominal damages on the

ground that they had been excluded from voting in the metropolitan
provincial and parliamentary elections of ; in consequence they
could play no part politically in problems of Belgian policy towards the
Congo. Their application was based on Articles  and  of the First
Protocol. The application came before the Commission, at this time
chaired by Sir Humphrey Waldock, on the issue of admissibility, and was
never communicated to the Belgian Government. The Belgian mem-
ber was Mrs G Janssen-Pevtschen, a Belgian judge from Brussels.
The Secretariat drew the applicants’ attention to the statement

made by the Belgian representative when depositing the instrument of
ratification and to the fact that Belgium had never made any declarations
of extension under Article  or Article . The applicants pointed out
that: ‘until st July  the Belgian Congo formed an integral part of
the national territory; that therefore the Convention, including the dec-
laration made by Belgium in virtue of Article , was in force in the
Colony equally with the metropolitan area without need for recourse to
the notifications provided for in paragraphs  and  of Article  of the
Convention and Article  of the Protocol’. The opinion of the
Commission, that the application was inadmissible under Article (),
was set out in the formal French style then in use at Strasbourg. One rea-
son given addressed the merits, and does not here concern us. The
other was that the application did not fall within the competence of the
Commission ratione loci. The justification for this was complex, and it is
clear that the Commission, possibly through the Belgian member, or
possibly through the Secretariat, undertook its own research, in effect
constructing the respondent’s possible arguments even though the case
had not been communicated. Reference was made to the fact that
between  and  the Belgian Government and Parliament had
considered the whole question of extension. The starting point was a
Report and projet de loi  presented by Senator Henri Rolin on behalf
of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee. This recommended that
Belgium should, for its metropolitan territory, ratify the Convention and
accept the optional clauses, and extend the Convention to the Congo, but
 They also made a claim for an award of nominal damages for insult. For an account of the
background see G Mwakikagile, Africa After Independence (Huntingdon, ).

 Communication from HE Judge Koen Lenaerts.
 The modern practice is for the Secretariat to write a letter drawing attention to ‘certain short-
comings’ in an application.  See n  above.

 It was that the complaint as to the denial of the right to participate in metropolitan elections
was not a violation of Art  of the st Protocol, for Belgium was not bound to give all persons a right
to vote in elections, and might legitimately exclude, eg, overseas residents. This was supported by
reference to the decision of the Commission on  January  in App No /; see () 
EYHR –, esp –.
 For Rolin’s report and discussion in the Senate see Séance du  Novembre , Annales
Parlementaires Sénat Session ord –, –, p ff, p ff, p ff. The account we give is fuller
than that which appears in the report in EYHR. It is possible that Rolin was consulted over Belgian
ratification, but we have no evidence for this.  See n  above.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
not to the trust territory of Ruanda-Urundi. The recommendation not to

extend to the trust territory was based on the undesirability of having
two systems of international control, one by the United Nations, the
other by the Council of Europe, for the same territory. The Report
argued that extension of the First Protocol and the right of individual
petition to the Congo would be premature. Rolin had, in the Consultative
Assembly, supported the system of voluntary extension, but hoped it
would be employed in the most liberal fashion. But he thought it import-
ant to distinguish between:
. . . civil rights whose enjoyment ought to be capable of recognition without any

distinction for the benefit of the totality of the individuals within the jurisdic-
tion of our States, and the political rights in question [ie the rights eventually
protected by Article  of the Protocol]. These would have to be, no doubt, the
object of widely differing conditions of application, according to the degree of
evolution of the different territories . . .
Extending the Convention to the Congo was opposed by the Government:
‘Notre territoires d’outre-mer n’est pas la Métropole. Le civilisation
africaine, en dépit des progrés gigantesques qu’elle a réalisés depuis plus
d’une demi-siècle, n’est pas encore la civilisation du vieil Occident’.
The Senate voted to adopt an amended projet de loi which did not approve
the extension, and which provided that the declaration provided for by
Article  would come into effect only after having received the approval
of both Chambers. The Chamber of Representatives accepted this on
 April . Throughout it was never doubted that in the absence of
extensions the Convention and the First Protocol would not apply; the
assumption was also that there would, eventually, be extension. The
Commission’s argument based on the historical material and on the
declaration which had accompanied ratification, was that Belgium’s
understanding was that in the absence of a declaration under Article 
neither the Convention nor the First Protocol applied to the Congo, and
this was certainly correct. This treated the intention of the Contracting
Party, however established, as controlling.
The Commission still had to address the argument that the Congo was
an integral part of Belgium, and that it did not therefore count as a
territory ‘for whose international relations it is responsible’ within the
meaning of Article . The Commission argued that the language used
in so-called colonial clauses, or reservations, had in contemporary
 TP VI –, speech during the nd Session of the Assembly, – August .
 Speech of M le vicomte du Bus de Warnaffe, Minister of Justice, .
 Projet de loi transmis par le Sénat No ,  Novembre , Document Parlementaires Chambre
de Représentants Session – II, –. The point of this was to rule out the possibility of the
King extending the Convention and st Protocol under his executive power.
 The resolution became Art  of the Law of  May , published in Moniteur Belge,
 August , . The Chamber’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, chaired by M Huysmans,
agreed with the Senate.
 A conceivable analysis of a colonial clause is that it permits what in effect amounts to a reser-
vation relating to territorial application.

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
practice ‘undergone a rapid and distinct change parallel with the change
in the legal position (régime juridique) of the territories concerned’. The
expression ‘territories for whose international relations [a contracting
state] is responsible’ had replaced other more restrictive terms formerly
employed in such clauses, such as ‘colonies’ (colonies) or ‘non-metropolitan
areas’ (territoires non métropolitaines). This change ‘represents an effort to
facilitate, although without rendering compulsory, the application of the
more important international treaties to territories the status of which is
as varied as it is changeable but without assigning a final degree of import-
ance to any one such status’. It then went on to say, in view of the

purpose underlying this change, in practice it was manifest (clair) that the
Belgian Congo fell into this category, and it was therefore superfluous
to inquire whether or not the Belgian Congo was, until  July , an
integral part of Belgium. This reasoning in effect adopts the elephant
theory. Everyone knows an elephant when they meet one; they come in
all shapes and sizes, and there is neither need nor value in producing def-
initions. In effect it was obvious that the Congo was the sort of territory
for which an extension was required if ever there was one. This approach
was the more plausible since the territory in question was, in common
sense, a clear example of an overseas colonial territory.
The second of the twelve cases, Bui Van Thanh and others v UK ()
was again a decision of the Commission on admissibility. A number of
Vietnamese persons, detained in Hong Kong pending their removal to
Vietnam, complained of violations of Articles , , , and  of the
Convention. They had claimed refugee status, but their claims had been
rejected, and they had exhausted domestic remedies. It was clear, and
conceded, that no declaration of extension of the Convention had ever
been made to Hong Kong. Their argument was that the responsibility of
the United Kingdom was nevertheless engaged because the actions of
which they complained, although those of the authorities in Hong Kong,
were based on decisions taken by the UK government, and simply imple-
mented the policies adopted by that government.
After conceding that, under Article , the concept of jurisdiction was
not limited to the territory of a High Contracting Party, the Commission
continued:
However the Convention system also provides the State with the option of
extending the Convention to territories for whose international relations it is
responsible by lodging a declaration . . . with the result that matters relating to
such territories fall within the jurisdiction of the High Contracting Party within
the meaning of Article  of the Convention. It is an essential part of the scheme
of Article  that a declaration extending the Convention to such a territory be
made before the Convention applies either to acts of the dependent Government
or of policies formulated by the Government of a Contracting Party in the
 It was also neither here nor there that some of the events complained of took place in any case
after  July .  App No / European Commission on Human Rights, DR , .
 The Commission cited ‘Nos. / and /, Cyprus v. Turkey’ () DR /.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
exercise of its responsibilities in relation to such territory. Accordingly, in the

present case, even if the Commission were to accept that the acts of the Hong
Kong authorities were based on United Kingdom policy, it must find that it has
no competence to examine the application . . .
The decision does not seriously address the problems surrounding the
location of violations—in territorial terms did the violation occur in the
United Kingdom or in Hong Kong? Or both? It also adopts an interpre-
tation which tends to limit protection, so that an extension is required
even where the authorities in a dependency are in effect acting as the
agents of the metropolitan government.

The third case, Yonghong v Portugal (), a more recent decision, this
time of the Court, went even further. The applicant was held in custody
in Macao under an international warrant issued by the People’s Republic
of China on charges of fraud. The Governor of Macao, in response to a
request for extradition, authorized extradition proceedings, and the
courts in Macao authorized his extradition. The applicant alleged that
his extradition would entail a violation of Article  of the Sixth Protocol
and of Articles  and  of the Convention. The possible relevance of the
Protocol arose because the charges could attract the death penalty,
though the Chinese Foreign Minister had given an assurance that it
would not be imposed. There had never been a declaration of extension
to Macao of either the Convention or of the Sixth Protocol.
The status of Macao at this time was that of a Chinese territory under
Portuguese administration pending its return to Chinese administration.
Under the Salazar regime Portugal, in Portuguese legal theory, had no
colonies; Macao was an overseas province of Portugal. In  it became
a special territory with a high degree of autonomy, and in , as a
result of negotiations with the Chinese government, which had always
taken the view that Portuguese presence in Macao was illegitimate, an
agreement was reached under which it was acknowledged that Macao was
part of China, but was to be under Portuguese administration until
. Under Portuguese domestic law Macao was deemed to be a
‘juristic person of domestic public law’. The Portuguese Constitution
applied until  December , and Portuguese legislation applied
there so long as it was published in the local Official Gazette. The territory
 According to this analysis, the effect of a declaration of extension would have been to bring
the applicants ‘within the jurisdiction’ of the UK, presumably because they would otherwise not be
within UK jurisdiction. This adopts the first of the three possible interpretations which we have set
out, and does not treat Art  as creating an exception to Art . Though it might have made some
sense if Hong Kong had been a protected state, it makes none at all in the case of a Crown Colony,
whose inhabitants are plainly within UK jurisdiction. Cyprus v Turkey (n  below) is to the
contrary.
 The th Protocol has in Art  a provision for extension similar to Art  of the st Protocol, but
drops the requirement that the territories must be ones for whose international relations the party is
responsible.
 The basis for this was Art  of the Portuguese Constitution and the agreement between
China and Portugal of  April , available at http://www.impresa.macau.gov.mo/bo/i///

dc/en/. For an account see Aldrich and Connell (n  above) –.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
was administered by a Governor, who was responsible to the President of

the Portuguese Republic. Adopting the reasoning set out in Bui Van
Thanh v UK the Court held the complaints were inadmissible. Article 
must be read in the light of Article , which enabled states:
. . . to bring issues relating to such territories within the ambit of the
Convention. An essential feature of the system established by Article  is that
the Convention cannot apply to acts of the authorities of such territories, nor to
the policies implemented by the Government of the Contracting Party
concerned in the exercise of their responsibilities for those territories, unless a
declaration extending the ambit of the Convention has been made.

The Court then went on to deal with the argument that Portugal’s
responsibility was engaged when the Governor, under discretionary
powers, allowed extradition proceedings to continue, pointing out that
the actual decision to extradite was taken by courts in Macao, whose
decisions were not open to review by courts in Portugal.
The Court did not address the question whether Macao was at this
time a territory for whose international relations Portugal was respon-
sible, so that the Convention was capable of extension to it; if it was not,
and this was the position under the agreement, the outcome was
that a territory under the administrative control of Portugal neither
enjoyed, nor could possibly enjoy, human rights protection under the
Convention. So Macao was a black hole so far as Convention protec-
tion was concerned.
There is no indication that the Commission or Court in any of these
three cases paid any attention to the Travaux Préparatoires, or to the rea-
son why Article () and (), and Article  of the First Protocol, were
included: to permit consultation with the local and, if not de jure, at least
by convention autonomous government of the territory, and this as a step
on the road towards decolonization. And the point of such consultation
was to extend human rights protection if the local government was agree-
able. No information was provided as to what, if any, consultations had
taken place. Nor was there any emphasis laid on the fact that the terri-
tories concerned were non-European. Nor, further, was there any reference
to the notion that the Convention should be interpreted in furtherance of
the protection of human rights. The effect of the first decision was that
in territory declared by Belgian law to be part of Belgium, human rights
were not protected. In the cases of Hong Kong and Macao the United
Kingdom had had nearly half a century to extend the Convention to
the territory, and Portugal over thirty years, though it may well be that
the failure to extend was a response to difficulties in relations with the
 This is made explicit in para VIII of Annex I to the Agreement, in which the policies of the
People’s Republic of China in relation to Macao are elaborated. Before  it might have been a
subject of dispute whether China or Portugal was responsible for Macao’s international relations.
 The language of Art  of the th and later Protocols, allows extension to territory or territories
without specifying that they have to be territories for whose international relations the party is
responsible.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
Chinese People’s Republic, though we have no evidence for this. Nothing

had been done, as if to prove that the function of colonial clauses was, as
critics such as Senghor had urged, that of denying protection to colonial
subjects. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but
not its Optional Protocol, applied to Hong Kong from , when the
United Kingdom ratified, and in  this was incorporated into Hong
Kong’s domestic law by the Bill of Rights Ordinance.
The fourth case is the strange Gillow v UK (), another decision
of the Court, which directly, though in a most unsatisfactory manner,
addressed, or perhaps one should say failed to address, the interpretation

of the colonial clause of the First Protocol, Article . The applicants, a
husband and wife, complained of violations of a number of Convention
rights and of Article  of the First Protocol. Their complaint related to
residential property, ‘Whiteknights’, in Guernsey which they had bought,
and in which at one time they had resided. In response to a housing
shortage in Guernsey the government of the island promoted legislation
under which, subject to exceptions, licences from a Housing Authority
were required for the occupation of property. The Guernsey Housing
Authority refused them a permit to live in the house, which had been
since  let to tenants, when in  they wished to return there. After
unsuccessful litigation in the Guernsey courts, they had sold the house in
, allegedly at below its true value. The Commission found that there
had been a violation of Article  of the Convention, and of Article  of
the First Protocol. The case was referred by the Commission to the
Court, and before the Court the United Kingdom conceded the violation
of Article . But it resisted the claim based on the First Protocol on the
merits.
After the oral argument had been concluded the agent for the United
Kingdom informed the Court by letter, with apologies, that no declara-
tion of extension of the First Protocol to the Bailiwick of Guernsey had
ever been made. The failure to extend the Protocol was probably the
result of an oversight. The Home Office had informed the Foreign
Office in  that the Channels Islands and the Isle of Man were agree-
able to extension, but the Foreign Office failed to do anything about this;
initially the matter was shelved because of the cases brought by Greece
over Cyprus. The merger of the Foreign Office with the Commonwealth
Office led to an oversight. In the s the East African Asians case
again led to deliberate delay. There was a failure of communication
between the two departments. An undated memorandum in the Home
 Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance . See R Wacks (ed), Human Rights in Hong Kong
() esp ch .
 Series A/ (Commission Report annexed at )  EHRR . Under the ‘thirty years’ rule
there are no papers in the NA.

 See n  above, citing HREE (n  above) –, based on NA CO / and . There
is also a historical account in FCO / and . In the case of Wiggins v UK () (n  above),
nobody apparently noticed that there had been no extension of the Protocol to Guernsey.
 NA FCO /.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
Office file on the Tyrer case, which provides information on the exten-
sion of the Convention, wrongly states that the First Protocol had been
extended to Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man. We guess that this
memorandum, or the papers relating to the earlier Wiggins case, which
would feature in the ‘previous papers’, consulted under normal civil
service practice, misled the United Kingdom’s agent. But this is conjec-
tural. The reason for inaction back in  was probably connected with
lack of enthusiasm for the extension of the First Protocol in the Colonial
Office. Why the United Kingdom did not, at least for the purpose of the
case, concede that the Protocol applied, failure to notify Strasbourg being

simply an error, is obscure.
The Delegate for the Commission, Mr Gaukur Jörundsson, suggested
that the United Kingdom must be considered as having recognized the
competence of the Commission ‘ad hoc’. He suggested that the Court, in
view of the United Kingdom’s admission of the violation of Article ,
might not find it necessary to consider the alleged violation of the First
Protocol. He added: ‘In the event that the Court considered it appropri-
ate to give a ruling on the complaint, the Delegate “would be ready to
make detailed submissions on the complex problems raised by the
Government’s letter”.’ This gave the Court an opportunity to consider
whether in the case of a European territory a declaration of extension
was needed at all. But without hearing the submissions offered by
Mr Jörundsson the Court ruled that it was entitled to examine the matter
ex officio, and since, according to the records of the Council of Europe,
no declaration of extension had ever been made, it had no jurisdiction to
entertain the complaint. So it was that by deliberate decision the argu-
ment that the Convention and its First Protocol applied even in the absence
of declarations of extension under Article () or under Article  of the
First Protocol, was never considered.
Under these four decisions, Contracting Parties have an absolute dis-
cretion to withhold the protection of the Convention and its First
Protocol, and this for as long as they like, from the territories ‘for whose
international relations they are responsible’. The scope of this discretion
is not restricted in any way by the apparent purpose underlying this pro-
vision of the Convention. Such territories may even be within Europe.
There is no indication in the cases as to what, if any, further characteris-
tics the governing arrangements for the dependent territory must have—
for example some degree of local autonomy. Nor do these decisions
attend to the Preamble’s reference to ‘the maintenance and further real-
ization of human rights and fundamental freedoms’ and to reaffirmation
 NA HO /.
 The Gillow case was relied upon in R (Quark Fishing Ltd) v Secretary of State for Foreign and
Commonwealth Affairs [] EWCA Civ  and [] UKHL  in relation to failure to extend
the st Protocol to the SGSSI. M Wood, in L-E Pettiti, E Decaux, and PH Imbert (eds), La
Convention Européene des Droits de L’Homme () ff, cites the case as authority for the view that
the requirement of extension under Art  is not limited to non-European territories.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
of the parties’ ‘profound belief in those fundamental freedoms which are

the foundation of justice and peace in the world’ or to the provision of
Article  of the Statute of the Council of Europe, which requires mem-
ber states, without any qualification, to ‘accept the principles of the rule
of law and of the enjoyment by all persons within its jurisdiction of
human rights and fundamental freedoms’. The decisions which we have
discussed do seem to be, at the least, not very satisfactory.
Our fifth, sixth, and seventh cases have made contributions to the
interpretation of Article () of the Convention, but without addressing
the relationship between this provision and Article . The first was

Wiggins v UK, an admissibility decision by the Commission. The back-
ground was the same as in the Gillow case. The applicant challenged the
refusal by the Housing Authority to grant him the licence he wanted on
the ground that there had been violations of Articles  and  of the
Convention, and of Article  of the First Protocol, which, it was wrongly
assumed, had been extended to Guernsey by declaration under Article .
The Commission, in holding that the application was manifestly unfounded
stated, en passant, that . . . ‘in regard to Art.  of the Convention, and in
particular as to the local requirements mentioned in Article (), the
Commission does not consider it necessary to make any separate findings
in this case other than to say that it does not find any significant social
or cultural differences between Guernsey and the United Kingdom
which could be relevant to the application of the Articles invoked in the
present case’.
The next case in this category, our sixth case, was Tyrer v UK (),
which also concerned a Crown Dependency or British Island. The
issue was whether the application of judicial corporal punishment by
birching in the Isle of Man violated the rights of the applicant. The
Court, by a majority, ruled that there had been a violation of Article  of
the Convention. The Convention had been extended to the Isle of
Man in , and in  the United Kingdom had made a declaration
recognizing for a number of territories, including the Isle of Man, the
compulsory jurisdiction of the Court and the right of individual petition
for a period of five years. There had been subsequent renewals including
one on  April . It was argued that the use of corporal punishment
in the island could be justified under Article (); there was considerable
popular support for the practice. The Court rejected this argument,
 For citations see n  above. In Piermont v France (), discussed below the Commission
simply applied the principle formulated in the Tyrer case and this was accepted by the Court.
  EHRR . There is a file, NA HO /.
 The Commission, also by a majority, had taken the same view.
 At this date birching was still employed in Guernsey; it was legally permissible in Jersey but
had passed out of use. It was used or legally possible in Belize, Bermuda, the Falkland Islands,
Gibraltar, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Montserrat, St Helena, the Seychelles, the Turks and
Caicos Islands, the British Virgin Islands, in some of the West Indies, and probably in Brunei. See
memorandum by DA Gordon-Smith in NA HO /. When the st Protocol was eventually
extended, there were reservations to preserve the flagellant tradition in Anguilla, the Virgin Islands,
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
and in doing so commented that ‘the system established by Article  was

primarily designed to meet the fact that, when the Convention was
drafted, there were still certain colonial territories whose state of civil-
ization did not, it was thought, permit the full application of the
Convention’. As a member of the European family of nations the Isle of
Man was not the kind of territory for which Article () was designed,
and in any case Article () could never be used to permit violations of
Article , which was not even derogable in time of war or public emer-
gency. It was simply assumed that an extension was required.
Our seventh case, which also addresses Article () (by now Article

()), is Py v France (). The applicant was a French University
research worker, who was appointed to the University of the Pacific,
located in Noumea in New Caledonia, where he was under his appoint-
ment bound to reside. In  an agreement was signed which prescribed,
during a transitional period, the political organization of New Caledonia
and the mechanisms whereby it was to be emancipated. Under an
Organic Law of March , passed in order to make provision for the
implementation of this agreement, ten years’ continuous residence in
New Caledonia was required before a person could be placed on the spe-
cial electoral register for elections of members of the New Caledonian
Congress and the provincial assemblies. M Py could not satisfy this
requirement and was not placed on the register. He complained of a vio-
lation of his rights under Article  of the First Protocol, and also of dis-
crimination, based on national origin—he was born in France—in
violation of Article .
When France ratified the Convention and the First Protocol in  it
had declared that they applied to the whole territory of the Republic,
having regard, in matters concerning the overseas territories, to the local
requirements (nécessités locales) to which Article  of the Convention
made reference. The French Government argued, inter alia, that the
inclusion of the condition of residence, which ensured that only those
with a firmly established connection to New Caledonia were entitled to
vote, was an essential element in measures designed to end violent con-
flict in the process of decolonization. It was also argued on the basis of
material in the Travaux Préparatoires, wrongly, that the purpose of
Article () was to take account of the autonomy retained in the matter
so far as certain overseas territories were concerned; autonomy was
relevant to the purpose of Article () and (), not (). The Court
decided that there had been no violation of Article . In part this
the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, St Helena and its dependencies, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
See HREE (n  above) . For the outcome of the Tyrer case see ()  BYIL  n .
 The Court noted the UK declaration of , and also noted that the UK Parliament could
legislate for the island, though it was not the practice to do so against the wishes of the island’s
government.  App No /, Judgment of  January .
 See text following n  above.  We do not discuss these other arguments.
 para .
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
conclusion was based on the concept of the margin of appreciation, and

the contention that the restriction had a legitimate purpose, and was
proportionate. But the Court also relied on Article (), and ruled that
the history of New Caledonia and the Organic Law of  could be
viewed as ‘local requirements’ (nécessités locales) which permitted the
restrictions imposed on the applicant’s right to vote. It satisfied the test
laid down in Tyrer v UK, there being la preuve décisive et manifest d’une
nécessité.
The Court did not address the fact that Article (), read literally,
appears only to apply the ‘local requirements’ qualification to territories

to which there has been a declaration of extension under Article ().
Possibly the Court took the view that the declaration made by France on
ratification did count as such a declaration, but this is not explicitly
stated.
In some of these cases it would have been possible to argue (though
with what success one cannot say) that an extension was unnecessary to
engage the responsibility of the respondent government. For example in
Gillow v UK it could have been argued that the Bailiwick of Guernsey
was not one of those non-European territories for which, in the view of
the Court in Tyrer v UK, Article  was designed. But as we have seen,
no opportunity was given for such an argument to be advanced. Again
in the Tyrer case itself the Court simply assumed that in the absence of
a declaration of extension under Article () the Convention would not
have applied. The same assumption was made in the Wiggins case by
the Commission. But the relationship between Articles  and  was not
addressed, and the possibility that such a declaration was not needed in
the case of a European territory was never argued. There would have
been no reason for the applicant’s counsel in the Tyrer case to put
forward such an argument, since there had been an extension, and the
applicability of the Convention was not contested. The United Kingdom
had conceded admissibility of the application with regard to Article .
And in the Wiggins case it had been assumed that there had been an
extension.
Matthews v UK, the eighth of our twelve cases, does not explicitly
address the interpretation of Article , or of Article  of the First
Protocol, but again clearly assumed that in the absence of a declaration
of extension, the First Protocol did not apply in Gibraltar—like the Isle
of Man a European territory. No argument to the contrary was pre-
sented, and as in Tyrer, there would have been no point in presenting
such an argument. This was also the situation in another case, one
 Text following n  above.  paras , .

  EHRR () , Judgment of  February . For comment see ()  BYIL
–.
 The Gibraltar Electoral Registration Officer had refused to register the applicant as a voter in the
European Elections. This, it was alleged, violated Art  of the st Protocol, extended to Gibraltar on
 February . The Treaty Establishing the European Community () applied to Gibraltar.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
which, had the facts been slightly different, would have provided an ideal
opportunity for the Court to have developed a principled analysis of the
relationship between the two articles. This was the well-known Gibraltar
case, McCann, Farrell and Savage v UK, which arose out of the fatal
shooting of three members of the Provisional IRA in Gibraltar by sol-
diers of the Special Air Service, a British military formation employed
on anti-terrorist operations, and based in the United Kingdom. But the
Convention had been extended to Gibraltar, together with the right of
individual petition, and acceptance of the jurisdiction of the Court.
Hence no issue arose over the competence of the Commission or Court

to entertain the case. So the relationship between the two articles was
never raised. But suppose there had been no extension? The question
would then have arisen as to whether the United Kingdom was so
directly involved in the operation as to be responsible under Article .
But on the facts it would have been pointless for counsel in the case to
have argued the point.
The case law we have discussed necessarily assumes the possibility
of black holes in the protection of human rights, and this even within
Europe. Drozd and Janousek v France and Spain, the ninth of our
cases, raised this possibility in a most curious way, by adopting reason-
ing under which form appears to have triumphed over substance. As
we have seen, the jurisprudence has adopted the position that such
black holes may exist through the choice of parties to the Convention,
who may decide not to extend protection to their overseas dependen-
cies, and indeed in the Yonghong case protection could not have been
extended. Drozd and Janousek goes further in relying upon formalistic
reasoning to say that there can even be European territories to which
it is impossible to extend the Convention. But some members of the
Court expressed misgivings, and there was a powerful dissenting
opinion by Dr Jochen Frowein in the report of the Commission.
The applicants had been convicted in Andorra, and sentenced to
imprisonment. Since Andorra had no prison, such persons could serve
Under it the Council of the European Communities was required to lay down appropriate arrangements
for elections to the European Parliament, which it did in . These were set out in an Act Concerning
the Election of the Representatives of the European Parliament by Direct Universal Suffrage of
 September . This was signed by the Foreign Ministers of the member states, and the provisions
of the Act made no provision for elections in Gibraltar. So the basis of the complaint was that Gibraltar
was within the European Community, yet the UK had, in , participated in a decision which
excluded residents in Gibraltar from participating in elections to the European Parliament, which exer-
cised significant functions in the legislative process of the European Community, capable of directly
affecting the applicant. For discussion see K Muller, ‘Problems of European Union Citizenship Rights
at the Periphery’ ()  Australian Journal of Politics and History .
 App No /,  EHRR ()  Judgment of  September . The Commission’s
Report is in A/.
 The Report of the Commission is reproduced in the opinion of the Court; no reasons were
given for declaring the case admissible on  September .

 Series A/,  EHRR () , Judgment of  June . See text to n  above for the
notion that there can be no black holes within the legal space of the Convention to which the collec-
tive guarantee of the Convention applies.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
their sentences either in a Spanish or a French prison, at their choice, and

the applicants had chosen France. They complained, inter alia, of viola-
tions of Article  of the Convention in that they had not had a fair trial
in Andorra. The case is of importance for the purposes of this article
only in relation to this complaint. The international status of Andorra
was at this time anomalous. It had, as rulers, two Co-Princes, the
President of France in his personal capacity, and the Bishop of Urgel,
who is appointed by His Holiness the Pope. The Co-Princes enjoyed legis-
lative, executive, and judicial powers, which were by custom exercised
jointly. These powers were normally exercised on their behalf by two

Permanent Delegates, one being the French Prefect of the Département
des Pyrénées Orientales, and the other being the Vicar General of the
Diocese of Urgel. Andorra possessed its own system of courts, partially
staffed by Spanish and French judges.
Andorra’s relationship with both France and Spain did not, as the
Court put it, ‘fit into the pattern of relations between sovereign States.
They have never taken the form of international agreements . . . such
relations take a number of forms: unilateral French acts, such as the
establishment of French schools; administrative arrangements, such as
those dealing with social security, telephone networks and customs
regimes’. Relations with Spain were similar. Andorra did not then
belong to any international organizations, nor did it have diplomatic
relations with other states. International relations were the joint concern
of the two Co-Princes, not of Spain or France. Andorra had, however,
acceded to two international agreements, and at the time of the case it
was envisaged that Andorra, though not yet a state, would in due course
become one. Although the term is not used in the judgment of the
European Court of Human Rights, the status of Andorra was at this time
similar to that of a protectorate, but, as a feudal relic, did not really fit
into any general category. Neither France nor Spain had purported to
extend the Convention to Andorra.
Spain argued that only a declaration of extension would make Spain
responsible for a violation of Article . Not only had no such declaration
been made, but there was a legal obstacle to making such a declaration,
since the conduct of international relations was the joint responsibility
of the Co-Princes. So Andorra was a territory for whose international
relations neither Spain, nor France, nor Spain and France jointly, was
 For discussion see J Duursma, Fragmentation and the International Relations of Micro-states
() – and Crawford, n  above. This anomalous status no longer exists; Andorra is, eg, a
member of the UN.
 paras  and . See Duursma (n  above)  noting that France had often claimed that the
French Co-Prince had exclusive power over Andorra’s international affairs.

 para .
 Crawford (n  above)  n ,  n ,  n , citing his article ‘The International Legal
Status of the Valleys of Andorra’ ()  Revue de Droit International, de Sciences Diplomatiques
et Politiques ; he points out that Andorra was not under the protection of the co-Princes, who
were joint sovereigns. See Oppenheim’s International Law (n  above) para , esp  n .
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
responsible. France similarly contended that the President of France

acted as Co-Prince in his personal capacity only, and France had in con-
sequence no power to enter into commitments on behalf of Andorra.
The Commission accepted this argument, adding that Andorra did not
form part of France or Spain, so that the Convention did not apply
automatically to it (ie under Article ). The Court took the same view,
that it did not have jurisdiction ratione loci, accepting this reasoning. It
also drew attention to the fact that Andorra was not a member of the
Council of Europe, so that it had never itself ratified the Convention.
Furthermore Andorra was not a territory common to Spain and France,

nor was it a Franco-Spanish condominium. So the Convention did not,
and could not, apply on Andorran territory.
The Court went on to consider whether the applicants were within the
jurisdiction of France or Spain through the extraterritorial reach of the
Convention: ‘The term “jurisdiction” is not limited to the national terri-
tory of the High Contracting Parties; their responsibility can be involved
because of acts of their authorities producing effects outside their own
territory.’ The applicant’s claim was based on the fact that French and
Spanish judges sat as members of Andorran courts, and by the claim that
French courts exercised supervisory powers over Andorran courts.
The Commission by a majority, and the Court, on this point unanimously,
ruled against the applicants, basically on two grounds. One was that:
‘Whilst it is true that judges from France and Spain sit as members of
Andorran courts, they do not do so in their capacity as French or Spanish
judges.’ The other was that neither France nor Spain exercised control or
supervision over Andorran courts.
In the Commission there was a powerful dissenting opinion by
Dr Jochen Frowein, who was joined by Messrs Soyer, Vanderberghe, and
Rozakis. The dissent was based upon an analysis of the practice of the
relationship between France, Spain, and Andorra: ‘The relevant question
in establishing whether a state is responsible under the Convention is
whether that state has exercised jurisdiction within the meaning of
Article  of the Convention, and it seems clear that both states exercise
jurisdiction in many fields in Andorra, notably in the field of justice.’
Later in the opinion they added: ‘We take the view that France and
Spain are jointly responsible for guaranteeing the compatibility with
the Convention of proceedings before the Tribunal de Corts . . . Since
Andorra is not regarded as a State with independent authority, but as
an entity under the suzerainty of the Co-Princes, it is not possible to
attribute the decisions complained of to any other subject of public
 para . The court cited X v Federal Republic of Germany, ()  EYHR,, Hess v UK
DR /, Cyprus v Turkey () DR /, X and Y v Switzerland () DR /, W v UK ()
DR /.
 This was curiously treated as raising an issue of jurisdiction ratione personae; the ‘person’
normally envisioned is the applicant, but here it refers to French or Spanish officials.
 At  ff.
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
international law.’ And although the ruling that the Court lacked juris-
diction was unanimous, there was a dissenting opinion related to another
complaint based on Article . This expressed considerable unease,
without adopting the reasoning of Dr Frowein. Andorra was not a state
in international law and had in any event not acceded: ‘Nor has France or
Spain, who have ratified the Convention, declared it to be applicable to
Andorra under Art. , and indeed a declaration under that Article could
not have been made with respect to Andorra, as Andorra is not strictly
speaking a territory for whose international relations France or Spain is
responsible.’ But the result, these judges thought, was unsatisfactory:

Can one accept that because the Convention has been ratified by France and
Spain, human rights must be respected on both sides of the Pyrenees, but not in
a small piece of land in the Pyrenees, despite the responsibilities these two coun-
tries exercise there, and despite the fact that this little territory would thus not be
subject to the rules of international human rights law. It seems difficult to accept
that there is a watertight partition between the entity of Andorra and the States
to which the Co-Princes belong, when in so many respects (enforcement of
sentences being a further example) these States participate in its administration.
Eventually Andorra joined the Council of Europe and became a party to
the Convention, which it signed in November , and ratified in
January .
This leaves us with a group of just three cases which, if only to a very
limited extent, have attempted to develop doctrine on the relationship
between Article  of the Convention and Article . Of these our tenth
case is the decision of the Commission in Cyprus v Turkey (), in
which an application was made seeking to establish Turkish responsibil-
ity for alleged violations of Convention rights in northern Cyprus.
Turkey had ratified the Convention and its First Protocol, but had never
purported to extend the Convention or Protocol to northern Cyprus. Nor
could it have done so, since in international law it was not, and is not,
responsible for the international relations of northern Cyprus. Its
contention was in any event that northern Cyprus was an independent
republic for whose activities it was in no way responsible; Turkey had
never purported to annex northern Cyprus. The Commission took
the view that the expression ‘within their jurisdiction’ (relevant de leur
jurisdiction):
. . . is not . . . equivalent to or limited to the national territory of the High
Contracting Party concerned. It is clear from the language, in particular of
the French text, and the object of the Article, and from the purpose of the
Convention as a whole, that the High Contracting Parties are bound to secure the
said rights and freedoms to all persons under their actual authority and responsi-
bility, whether that authority is exercised within their own territory or abroad.
 At –.
 By Judges Pettiti, Valticos, and Lopes Rocha, approved also by Judges Walsh and Speilman.
 DR /, App Nos / and /.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
The Commission then went on to try to explain, given this view, what the
function of Article  was:
The Commission does not find that Art.  . . . can be interpreted as limiting
the scope of ‘jurisdiction’ in Art.  to such metropolitan territories. The purpose
of Art.  is not only the territorial extension of the Convention but its adapta-
tion to the measure of self-government attained in particular non-metropolitan
territories and to the cultural and social differences in such territories; Art. ()
confirms this interpretation. This does not mean that the territories to which
Art.  applies are not within the ‘jurisdiction’ within the meaning of Art..
It is not easy to understand from this when or why an extension is neces-

sary; perhaps the Commission meant that it was only in the case of a
dependency which both enjoyed a degree of autonomy and was culturally
different that one was required. But this was not actually said. The real-
ity may be that, given its view on Article , the Court was unable to pro-
vide a satisfactory explanation of the function of Article . Conceivably
the idea was that the effect of a declaration under Article  was not to
bring the territory ‘within the jurisdiction’ under Article , but merely to
trigger the application of the ‘local requirements’ provision in Article (),
but this is speculative. The fundamental reason for the Court’s difficulty
was that, given its view of the scope of Article , Article  with its
system of voluntary extension becomes an anachronism. Nor did the
Commission address the possibility, as under our third interpretation,
that Article () made possible the extension of the Convention to
protected states whose inhabitants could not be said to be ‘within the
jurisdiction’ in the absence of a declaration.
Our eleventh case, the second in this group, is Loizidou v Turkey
(Preliminary Objections) (). Of central importance on the issue of
the extraterritorial reach of the Convention under Article , it is also
relevant to the relationship between Articles  and . It addresses the
matter directly, though only in one short passage. Mrs Loizidou, who
owned property in northern Cyprus, claimed that Turkish military forces
there had denied her access to her property. During a protest march there
she was arrested and detained by the Turkish Cypriot police force. She
alleged violations of Articles , , and  of the Convention and of Article 
of the First Protocol.
Objection was taken to the admissibility of the application before the
Commission, which noted that ‘the acts complained of “were carried out
by Turkish military forces stationed in the northern part of Cyprus or by
forces acting under their authority” ’. The Court, by a majority,
 Series A/, App No /,  EHHR ,  March .

 Quoted at para . See Crawford (n  above) –, –.
 There was a joint dissenting opinion by Mr Gölcüklü and Mr Pettiti; on the Art  issue or
jurisdiction they thought it was premature to reach a decision before there had been a full enquiry
on the merits. They did not disagree with the view that jurisdiction might be extraterritorial. They
also took the view that at this stage in the case the Turkish declarations under Arts  and  should
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
decided that the acts complained of were capable of engaging the respon-
sibility of Turkey under Article  because ‘the responsibility of a Contracting
Party may arise when as a consequence of military action—whether law-
ful or unlawful—it exercises effective control over an area outside its
national territory’. The Court also held that territorial limits attached
to Turkey’s declarations accepting the right of individual petition and
the jurisdiction of the Court, which sought to confine the operation of
the optional clauses to Turkey’s national territory, were invalid. It
further took the view that where a state which had accepted the right of
individual petition incurred extraterritorial responsibility through the

acquisition of control over other territory, there existed no requirement
that this right be further extended to the territories in question. Article
() had no relevance to such a situation.
The Court, like the Commission in Cyprus v Turkey, now felt
obliged to explain what, given its view on Article , the function of
Article  was. It did not engage in any elaborate analysis but did, en pas-
sant as it were, express a general view of its function, here contrasting it
with Article : ‘Article  concerns a decision by a Contracting Party to
assume full responsibility under the Convention for all acts of public
authorities in respect of a territory for whose international relations it is
responsible. Article , on the other hand, concerns the acceptance by the
Contracting Party of the competence by the Commission to examine
complaints relating to the acts of its own officials acting under its direct
authority.’ Two points need to be noticed. The first is the use of the
word ‘all’; the implication is that there still might be responsibility for
particular acts under Article , for example acts specifically authorized,
even without a declaration. The second is that although the point is not
developed the implication of this passage must be that where responsi-
bility is being imputed to a state for the acts of its own officials Article 
is not relevant, and Article  governs the situation (just as it does when
extraterritorial effect is given to the Convention through the exercise of
authority and control by agents of the respondent state). It is not easy to
reconcile this with the decision in Yonghong v Portugal, though the Court
there emphasized that the gravamen of the complaint related to the acts
of courts in Macao, which were not under the control of the Portuguese
government.
Ilasçu v Moldova and Russia, our twelfth case, raised the curious
question whether a party could, when ratifying the Convention, validly
declare that a part of its metropolitan territory over which it did not
not have been severed. A separate opinion by Mr Gölcüklü took the view that the territorial limits
attached to the Turkish declarations were valid, applying, at least by analogy, Art .
 paras –.  paras –.  para .  () DR /.
 para .
 Thus in British colonial practice decisions formally taken by a Colonial Governor might be
authorized by a Cabinet or ministerial decision if they were of political significance, and Governors
could be instructed accordingly. See for examples HREE (n  above) –, –, –.
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
at the time possess de facto control could be excluded from being

within its jurisdiction under Article , so as to be outside the reach of
the Convention. There the Moldovan Government, on ratifying the
Convention on  September , declared that it was unable to guar-
antee compliance with the Convention in that part of its territory under
the de facto control of the self-proclaimed Transdniestria Republic until the
conflict in the region was resolved. Moldova had ratified the Convention
with regard to its whole territory, but its instrument of ratification was
accompanied by several declarations and reservations. The Court ruled
that this particular declaration did not rank as a legitimate reservation

under Article  (formerly Article ) for reasons which do not concern
us here. But it also rejected the argument that Articles  and  of the
Convention should be read together, and Article  interpreted broadly
so as to permit territorial limits to be attached to a ratification, at least
when the territory in question was not under the contracting parties’
control. The Court rejected this, relying on two arguments. One was that
under the earlier jurisprudence of the Court it had not been possible to
attach territorial restrictions to acceptance of the optional right of indi-
vidual petition under Article . It went on: ‘It considers, secondly, that
neither the spirit nor the terms of Article , which provides for extend-
ing the Convention’s application to territories other than the metropoli-
tan territories of the High Contracting Parties, could permit of a negative
interpretation in the sense of restricting the scope of the term “jurisdic-
tion” within the meaning of Article  to only part of the territory.’ It will
be seen that this decision assumes, but does not elaborate, a conception
of a non-metropolitan territory to which alone the system of territorial
voluntary extension or non-extension of Article  applies. The case also
followed Loizidou in treating the Russian Federation as responsible
under the Convention for violations occurring in Transdniestria.
C        
The jurisprudence, meagre as it is, wholly fails to address the way in

which the world in which Article  operates today has changed since the
s, and this notwithstanding the fact that the conception of the
Convention as a living instrument, to be interpreted in the light of
present-day conditions, is now so embedded in the jurisprudence that it
would be otiose to cite authority for it.
 App No /, Admissibility,  July , Merits ()  EHRR , both Grand
Chamber. See Crawford (n  above)  n .

 The cases of Öcalan v Turkey (App No /,  December ), and Issa v Turkey (App
No /,  May ) further illustrate the doctrine under which a party may become responsi-
ble for violations occurring outside its national territory, but do not address the relationship between
Arts  and , so we do not discuss these cases. Nor do we discuss the decision of the English House
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
Thus one function of the colonial clause, insisted upon by Belgium,

was said to be ‘the standard of civilization of the native population’ of
some territories which, so it was said, made it inappropriate to extend the
full protection of the Convention to them; the implication was that this
standard was low. The underlying rationale of Article  of the First
Protocol, insofar as can be inferred from the Travaux Préparatoires, was
that the rights included in the Protocol, especially the right to participate
in democratic government, could hardly be guaranteed to the inhabitants
of territories in which there were, under colonialism, no elections at all,
or elections in which most of the population did not participate. One has

only to set this out to make the point that this function of the colonial
clause should have no place in the world of today. If there are today good
reasons for tailoring the application of the Convention to special neces-
sities in dependencies, whether in Europe or elsewhere, or to particular
regions, the matter can surely be handled through the doctrines of the
margin of appreciation and proportionality—neither of which existed
when the text of the Convention was negotiated.
Again the other function served by the colonial clause, that insisted
upon by the major colonial power of the period, the United Kingdom,
was to enable the colonial power to respect and further the autonomy
enjoyed in varying degrees by overseas dependencies which were on their
way to becoming independent self-governing states, and whose associa-
tion with the mother country, if it continued, was to become wholly
voluntary. At the time when the Convention was negotiated what may
loosely be called ‘colonies’ were not the only territories under the sover-
eignty of Contracting Parties which enjoyed a measure of autonomy.
For example the Faroe Islands, part of the Kingdom of Denmark,
enjoyed a high degree of autonomy in domestic affairs under legislation
of . Today there are numerous other European territories which
are in a similar position, such as the Åland Islands (Finland), Ceuta,
Melilla, and the Canary Islands (Spain), the Azores and Madeira
(Portugal), Greenland and the Faroes (Denmark). If we have regard
to substance, rather than form, such autonomous or semi-autonomous
regions are in much the same position as the United Kingdom’s
Crown Dependencies, or such of the BOTs as enjoy domestic auton-
omy—for example the Cayman Islands, or Bermuda. The case of the
Åland Islands is particularly instructive. Finland is responsible for its
of Lords in R v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, ex p Quark Fishing Ltd
[] UKHL , but note that the House’s view of Strasbourg law is at odds with the position
adopted in this article, which was not available to Counsel involved in the case.
 See generally Lapidoth (n  above).
 Aldrich and Connell (n  above) –, Lapidoth (n  above) – and n  on .
 Aldrich and Connell (n  above) –.  ibid –.
 Lapidoth (n  above) –.
 The complete list would include Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman
Islands, the Falklands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, possibly Pitcairn, St Helena and perhaps its
Dependencies, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. For this see PPP (n  above) –
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
international relations, but must consult with the Islands’ government

over negotiations, and treaties do not enter into force in relation to the
Islands without the consent of the government there. So as a matter of
Finnish law, rather than mere convention, the relationship between
Finland and the Islands corresponds to the conventional British colonial
relationship which was thought, back in the s, to justify insistence
on colonial clauses. The legal regime of the European Union has been
tailored to the existence of such territories where this has been thought
desirable, but without drawing a rigid line between territories which in
the past ranked as colonies and those which did not. There are special

arrangements both for the British, French, Dutch, and Danish overseas
territories and countries (OTCs), which are not part of the European
Union but have links with member states, and for the outermost regions,
which are part of the European Union, and comprise certain French
overseas departments, the départements d’outre-mer (DOMs), the Canary
Islands, the Azores, and Madeira.
The European Convention made no special provision for such
autonomous or semi-autonomous territories over and above the colonial
clause. The unfortunate result was that the United Kingdom was able to
treat its European territories—the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man,
Gibraltar, and Cyprus—which were and, with one exception, Cyprus,
still are under its sovereignty, as falling under the arrangements estab-
lished by Article () and () and Article  of the First Protocol. One
consequence of this well illustrates the deplorable use to which the
system of extension was put: to enable full and effective human rights
protection to be withheld from them. As we have seen, such protection
was indeed withheld for prolonged periods, as, for example, in the case of
the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, and Gibraltar. And, under Article ,
the metropolitan government can modify from time to time the extent of
human rights protection provided, as is still the situation.
It seems extremely unlikely that there would be any support today
within the Council of Europe for amending the Convention so as to
introduce a new territorial applications clause, providing for voluntary
extension (or failure to extend) to the numerous autonomous or semi-
autonomous European regions. This being so, it seems wholly anomalous
that there still exists a system of voluntary extension which, under exist-
ing jurisprudence, only applies to an arbitrary selection of autonomous
or semi-autonomous territories: those once colonized by European pow-
ers, for example the Falklands, or which, as in the case of the Crown
Dependencies, have been treated as if they had once been colonized,
which they had not been. Why should the position of such territories be
 L Hannikainem and F Hern (eds), Autonomy and Demilitarization in International Law: the
Åland Islands in a Changing Europe () –, –, Lapidoth (n  above) – and notes at
–. Crawford (n  above) –.
 F Murray, The EU Member State Territories. The Special Relationship under Community Law
().
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
any different under Convention law from that of the Azores, or the Åland
Islands? And if there is today no good reason then the system of
voluntary extension, with its option of non-extension, should no longer
have any place in Convention law.
On the assumption that the colonial clause, whatever name we give it,
and the whole system of voluntary and partial extension is now anachro-
nistic we now make some suggestions as to how the situation could pos-
sibly be remedied; we do not presume to offer the correct solution, but
merely to suggest some possibilities.
The simplest solution, technically, if not politically, would be a new

Protocol amending both the Convention and its First Protocol. Article
() no longer has any legitimate function, and it is difficult to see any
objection to removing Article  from the text entirely. The only func-
tion actually served by retaining the system of optional extension under
Article () and () of the Convention and Article  of the First Protocol
is to provide parties with an argument for escaping the responsibilities
they would have under Article , in the absence of these Articles.
Reliance on such an argument has become all the more anomalous
since the modern Strasbourg Court’s jurisprudence of Article  gives a
Contracting Party no option of evading accountability for failure to
provide protection for the inhabitants of territory under its de facto
control, as, for example, in the case of Turkey in relation to northern
Cyprus and even parts of Iraq, and the Russian Federation in relation to
Transdniestria.
There would, in theory at least, be a problem in that under the third
possible interpretation of the existing Article it enables the benefit of the
Convention to be extended, in the case of protected states, to persons
who would not otherwise be ‘within the jurisdiction’ under Article . In
the case of the United Kingdom this would today have no practical
significance, since there are no longer any British protected states, and
the same is the case for other members of the Council of Europe.
Indeed protected states have vanished everywhere. There might also
be thought to be a problem if Article  of the First Protocol was simply
deleted, for Article  mandates the recognition of a right to participate in
elections for the legislature. In some of the BNOTs, for example the
BAT, it would hardly be practicable to hold elections for a local legisla-
ture. In the case of Matthews v UK where the applicant, resident in
Gibraltar, had been denied the right to participate in elections to the
 Aldrich and Connell (n  above) set out the problems of defining what counts as one of the
last colonies (see –) and give a valuable account of their diversity (–) but the authors do not
discuss the relevance of their analysis to the scope of the European Convention.
 We do not in this article discuss the later Protocols, though our arguments would seem to apply
to them as well.
 For the present status of European micro-states (Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San
Marino, and the Vatican) see Duursma (n  above) passim.

 Oppenheim’s International Law (th edn) (n  above) paras  and .
 App No /, Judgment of  February . See Muller (n  above).
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
European Parliament, the Court found that on the facts there had been a
violation of Article ; whatever may be said for or against the decision the
Court referred explicitly to the relevance of the margin of appreciation
under which limitations on the franchise, if appropriate, may be legiti-
mate. Where such territories are in fact simply administered by the home
government it would not require much ingenuity to satisfy Article  by,
for example, a system of postal or proxy voting in metropolitan elections
for citizens temporarily resident. There is no reason why Article 
should not apply in such territories, and if Article  was capable of appli-
cation in that the territory had some children to educate, there is no rea-

son why it should not apply to ensure access to education was provided,
not necessarily in the territory itself. In the case of the BIOT, where the
indigenous population, which included numerous children, was unlaw-
fully expelled, and the current population comprises officials, US service
personnel, civilian contractors, and visiting scientists, the application of
the First Protocol would certainly raise issues which would need to be
addressed. For British citizen transients Article  might best be satisfied
by existing arrangements for postal or proxy voting, but if the Chagos
Islanders were, in the future, to be allowed to return, as surely they ought
to be, there seems to be no reason not to enable them to participate in the
democratic process; it would be a question of whether this should be
done through establishing a local legislature, and giving the territory to
which they returned a degree of autonomy which it does not presently
possess, or merely by giving them representation through the United
Kingdom Parliament.
In the absence of radical amendment by a new protocol, the existing
texts have to be interpreted in accordance with the principles which have
been established in the constantly evolving jurisprudence of the Court.
The small number of cases is not, as we have seen, particularly helpful
on the interaction between Articles ,  (previously ), and ; some are
merely admissibility decisions by the Commission, and none have pro-
vided a comprehensive analysis. Although the relationship between
Article  and the provisions for extension was never explored in the
course of the negotiations, the Travaux Préparatoires do make it quite
clear what the purpose of Article () was, and the development of the
doctrines of the margin of appreciation and of proportionality provides
an obvious justification for regarding it as simply obsolete. Any reliance
today on its original rationale, the supposed low state of civilization in
certain overseas dependencies, would be offensive.
 Under the British Overseas Territory Act () BOT citizens have been given full British
citizenship, but there is an exception under s () for those whose citizenship depends merely upon
their connection with the SBAs in Cyprus, so that they do not benefit from this. There are special
provisions for the Chagos which go some way to offset the consequences of their expulsion. British
citizens can, of course, vote in UK elections.
 A possible solution might be to reorganize the boundaries of the BIOT, and perhaps treat some
parts of the archipelago as a distinct territory; there are two other habitable atolls, Peros Banhos and
Salomon, at a considerable distance from Diego Garcia. Any development of a local autonomy which
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
As for the provisions for voluntary extension, the original rationale,

quite plain from the Travaux Préparatoires—respect for and furtherance
of autonomy—can certainly have no application to the BNOTs—the
BAT, the SBAs, the SGSSI, and the BIOT—which have been created
since the original negotiations. The Convention surely already applies
under Article . Voluntary extension presupposes the possibility of con-
sulting with a local governmental institution possessing some significant
degree of autonomy. Ascension Island would seem to be in substantially
the same position. If the reality of the matter is that such a body does not
exist, or exists only in symbolic form, logic dictates that such a provision

is rendered irrelevant. If a state’s central government can, without con-
sultation or approval or consent by any local democratic institution,
extend or not extend the Convention to a territory, then to deny that such
a territory is ‘within the jurisdiction’ under Article  is untenable if the
interpretation of the Convention is related to its object and purpose.
So far as the BNOTs are concerned, much the same result could be
achieved in a different way through the doctrine suggested, but not elab-
orated, in the Loizidou case, according to which the function of exten-
sion was explained: ‘Article  concerns a decision by a Contracting Party
to assume full responsibility under the Convention for all acts of public
authorities in respect of a territory for whose international relations it is
responsible. Article , on the other hand, concerns the acceptance by the
Contracting Party of the competence of the Commission to examine
complaints relating to the acts of its own officials acting under its direct
authority.’ The distinction here being made involves, to put it simply,
drawing a line between actions of the public authorities in the depend-
ency, and actions of the home government. Where officials in the depend-
ency are directly controlled by the contracting state’s central government
there would appear to be no case for arguing that extension is required.
Indeed such an analysis would have been possible on the facts of Bui
Van Thanh and others v UK and in Yonghong v Portugal had the
Commission and the Court approached the matter with a view to fur-
thering the object and purpose of the Convention.
Such an interpretation would, at least in theory, certainly make more
difficult the development of black holes in human rights protection
located in a dependency of a European power. The risks involved are not
fanciful; there are, for example, foreign bases administered by a state
which is not and cannot become a party to the European Convention on
might lead to independence would encounter difficulties with Mauritius, given the undertakings
given, and the fact that the BIOT can be viewed as a colonial enclave. Mauritius, which was at the
time of independence compensated for the loss of the islands, currently claims the BIOT.
 The same may be said, eg, in relation to the normally uninhabited Bouvet Island, albeit an
implausible location for human rights violations, though strange and nasty things do happen in out-
landish places. For examples, see AWB Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law. A Victorian
Yachting Tragedy () passim.
 Loizidou v Turkey (Preliminary objections)  EHRR , at para . See ‒ above.
 Above at .  Above at .
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
Ascension Island, Diego Garcia, and in Greenland, to give but three

illustrations. We do not suggest that there have been violations of human
rights in such bases by the United States (though in the Chagos Islands,
we would argue, there have been by the United Kingdom), nor are such
violations necessary to our argument. The point merely is that if terri-
tories are under the territorial sovereignty of parties to the European
Convention such parties should surely be accountable, at least prima
facie, for what goes on there, whether or not it happens within the foreign
base, and should not be able simply to rely on a territorial clause and the
lack of voluntary extension as providing any kind of unqualified exemp-

tion. It would, of course, be up to the Court, were any complaint to be
brought before it, to follow the approach it took in the Ilasçu case to
Moldova’s responsibilities in relation to those parts of its territory con-
trolled by the Russian Federation in order to establish whether or not the
relevant party to the Convention could be held responsible for activities
which took place on a base under the control of another state. In January
 a British Government spokesman, in response to a question in
Parliament, explicitly denied that any Taliban suspects were held on
Diego Garcia, and said that for this to be the case United Kingdom
permission would be required, the reference being to a provision of a
 agreement requiring prior consultation before access was given to a
person not covered by the specific provisions on access. This reply was
at least consistent with there being United Kingdom responsibility,
though the answer was not addressed to the issue.
There may of course be other situations in which a party is not in de
facto control of the locality where the violations of the Convention have
occurred. This has been the situation in northern Cyprus, and was the
situation which arose in Ilasçu and others v Moldova and Russia.
Moldova was not in effective control of Transdniestria, part of its
national territory, where there existed a separatist movement in conflict
with the legitimate Moldovan government. This movement, it was
claimed, was being actively supported by the Russian Federation. The
Court nevertheless held that this territory was still within Moldova’s
jurisdiction under Article  of the Convention, and this notwithstanding
a declaration which had accompanied Moldova’s ratification. The
Court took the position that Moldova’s positive obligations still obtained
even in relation to areas where it could not be held responsible for posi-
tive acts of violation: ‘These obligations remain even where the exercise
of the State’s authority is limited in part of its territory, so that it has a
duty to take all appropriate measures which it is still within its power
to take.’ This doctrinal approach enables the Court to adapt its
 ()  BYIL –, HL Deb vol , col ,  January . See para  of the agreement
(n  above), which could be read as requiring both parties to agree.

 See n  above.  See text to n  above.
 Merits, paras –. This conclusion was reached by  votes to .
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
conception of accountability so that whether the party with territorial

sovereignty will incur responsibility will necessarily turn on the particu-
lar facts and legalities of each case. And if Moldova’s responsibility was
incurred in relation to Transdniestria even when outside its de facto con-
trol the responsibility of the United Kingdom must, a fortiori, surely be
engaged in relation to BNOTs.
In the Ilasçu case the Court was also concerned with the responsibility
of the Russian Federation, and, in the admissibility decision, adopted the
principle, derived from Loizidou v Turkey under which ‘regard being
had to the object and purpose of the Convention, the responsibility of a

Contracting Party may also arise when as a consequence of military
action—whether lawful or unlawful—it exercises effective control of an
area outside its national territory. This principle was adopted and
elaborated by the Court in the hearing on the merits, and on the facts
the Court ruled that the responsibility of the Russian Federation was
engaged, the territory falling within Russian jurisdiction under Article .
The statement of the principle in the case was wide; responsibility was
incurred because the regime in the territory was ‘set up . . . with the
support of the Russian Federation, vested with organs of power and of
its own administration, remains under the effective authority, or at the
very least under the decisive influence, of the Russian Federation’. If
Turkey can be held responsible for violations in northern Cyprus on the
basis of its de facto control, and the Russian Federation, similarly, for vio-
lations in Transdniestria, it is difficult to see why the United Kingdom
should not be responsible under Article  for violations in the BNOTs.
The difference is that its exercise of control is lawful, but why should this
be critical? It is very odd to deny responsibility predicated on ‘jurisdic-
tion’ on the ground that the jurisdiction has arisen in accordance with
international law.
So far as dependencies within Europe are concerned, the practice and
the limited jurisprudence has, without the issue ever having been argued
or fully considered, allowed the Convention and its First Protocol to be
interpreted so as to permit Contracting Parties to deny the full protection
of the Convention even to such European territories as the Isle of Man and
the Channel Islands. There is, we suggest, a powerful counter-argument,
which has never been presented to the Court, that the assumption that
extension is required is incorrect. It is that the colonial clause should
be interpreted as a whole, and in the light of Article , so that only ter-
ritories to which it was appropriate, because of their low standard of
civilization, to apply Article (), were intended to be covered by the
system of voluntary extension. The text of Article () supports this,
since it provides that: ‘The provisions of this Convention shall be applied
  EHRR  (Preliminary objections).

 Admissibility decision, . The Court was unable at this stage to decide whether the Russian
Federation was in control.  paras –
 paras –.  para .
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
in such territories with due regard however, to local requirements’

(emphasis added). The territories in question must be those referred to
in Article () or (), to which the Convention was not to apply without
extension. This would surely rule out European territories. And, if there
are now no such territories, either within Europe or elsewhere, the logic
of this argument would lead to the more radical conclusion that the
whole system of voluntary extension has been overtaken by events and
has no place in the dynamic Convention law of the twenty-first century.
Such a conclusion would indeed be in line with official statements on
UK policy in relation to its overseas dependencies. In a White Paper pre-

sented to Parliament in  by the Secretary of State for Foreign and
Commonwealth Affairs, Partnership for Progress and Prosperity. Britain
and the Overseas Territories, it was stated that:
We regard the establishment and maintenance of high standards of observance
of human rights as an important aspect of our partnership with the Overseas
Territories. Our objective is that those territories which choose to remain British
should abide by the same basic standards of human rights, openness and good
government that British people expect of their Government. This means that
Overseas Territory legislation should comply with the same international obli-
gations to which Britain is subject, such as the European Convention on Human
Rights and the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The
Overseas Territories have a well-deserved reputation for their respect for and
observance of human rights, but changes are still necessary in some territories to
ensure consistency.
A somewhat different and again radical approach to the interpretation of
the Convention which might usefully be applied to Articles  and  is
suggested by the case of Piermont v France (). There the Court
was faced with a problem over the interpretation of Article : ‘Nothing
in Articles , , and  shall be regarded as preventing the High
Contracting Parties from imposing restrictions on the political activity of
aliens.’ This provision, though not so regarded back in the s, now
seems somewhat anomalous, and in  the Parliamentary Assembly of
the Council of Europe recommended, inter alia, that the Committee of
Ministers should instruct experts ‘to make proposals for the amendment
of the European Convention . . . in such a way as to exclude restrictions
at present authorised by Article  with respect to political activity on the
exercise by aliens of the freedoms guaranteed by Article  (freedom of
expression) and Article  (freedom of association)’. No such amend-
ment has yet taken place. Mrs Dorothée Piermont, a German national,
was a member of the European Parliament. She visited two French
Overseas Territories, New Caledonia and French Polynesia, with a view
 Cm , March , para .. The Foreign Secretary at the time was the late Robin Cook.
 Specific reference was made to three human rights issues: judicial corporal punishment, the
criminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults, and capital punishment, then still
possible in Bermuda, to which the th Protocol had not been extended. cf a note of a ministerial
statement in ()  BYIL .  Series A/, ()  EHRR .
 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN
to conducting political activities there. The basic issue in the case, so far
as Article  was concerned, was whether it was legitimate in principle
for measures officially taken against her in French Polynesia, which
restricted her freedom of expression, to be justified under Article , on
the ground that she was an alien under applicable French law. The
Commission, emphasizing the fact that the Convention was to be inter-
preted as a living instrument, and must be interpreted in the light of the
evolution since it was drafted of the European Community and European
Union, ruled that Mrs Piermont, as a member of the European
Parliament, could not be treated as an alien (étrangère) within the mean-

ing of Article . The Commission did not go so far as to rule that
Article  could no longer apply in general because of developments
since its text was adopted. The Court held by five votes to four that there
had been breaches of Article  in both New Caledonia and French
Polynesia and that ‘it considers that Mrs. Piermont’s possession of the
nationality of a member State of the European Union and, in addition to
that, her status as a member of the European Parliament do not allow
Article  of the Convention to be raised against her, especially as the
people of the Overseas Territories take part in the European Parliament
elections’. Again the decision does not mean that Article  is deprived
of all function.
The Piermont case is, of course, directly relevant only to Article , but
the approach adopted in the case might well prove fruitful in relation to
the relics of colonialism which still disfigure the text and jurisprudence
of the Convention
The United Kingdom’s negotiators, supported only by the Netherlands,
relied throughout on a philosophy of devolution of responsibility to colo-
nial territories, encouraging them to be progressively governed by local
institutions. This justified the supposed necessity to consult with
dependencies before binding them to any international obligations. They
never argued that a need to restrict protection justified colonial clauses.
It could be that the colonial clause was appropriate at a time when the
nature of the relationship between colonial powers and their dependen-
cies was both too complex and too fluid for a uniform rule to be viable or
politically acceptable. An option of extension was the best that could
then be agreed. Understood in this way, the colonial clause was essen-
tially an interim provision.
The question that now needs to be asked is how such a provision
should be interpreted in the twenty-first century, when the colonial
world, at least in the form it took in the s, no longer exists.
Dependencies of European powers, such as the BOTs, still exist, but if
they choose to remain in a dependent relationship with a European state
 See the report of the Commission, App Nos / and / of  January , paras
–. For the ‘living instrument’ doctrine, reliance was there placed on Marckx v Belgium ()
Series A/, para  and Airey v Ireland () Series A/, para .  para .
CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 
and therefore cannot themselves be directly accountable under the

Convention their parent state surely ought to be. What is required today
is an approach to the interpretation of the Convention which is directed
to ensuring that for the future the power of states, or their dependencies,
insofar as they exercise autonomous powers, either de facto or de jure, to
deny full human rights protection, and create, as it were, black holes in
the world of human rights is reduced, ideally, to vanishing point. The
modern case law on Article , in particular the decisions in Loizidou and
Ilasçu, has been directed towards this end. This case law sits uneasily
with earlier decisions which have enabled parties to rely upon an

anachronistic system of voluntary extension to evade responsibility for
violations of human rights although they have enjoyed both de facto and
de jure power to prevent such violations. It would be possible today for
the Court to approach the interpretation of the provisions relating to
extension in the same spirit as underlies the Loizidou and Ilasçu cases,
which would both conform to the basic principle embodied in Article 
of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and implement the
doctrine, now firmly rooted in the jurisprudence, that the Convention is
a living instrument which must be interpreted in the light of present-day
conditions.
 When this article was in page proof we learned that the Strasbourg Court (Fourth Section), on
 September , had declared inadmissible an application by Quark Fishing Limited against the
UK (Application No /). It was not communicated to the UK Government. The ground was
that the First Protocol had never been extended to SGSSI under Article . The brief Opinion does
not contain any extensive discussion of the range of arguments presented in this article at ‒
above, and in particular does not address the argument based on intent. It takes the view that the
Court has no power to ‘rewrite’ the Convention; in this article we do not argue that it should.

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02-Bybil-76-Chap02.

qxd 11/25/06 7:02 AM Page 121

GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN

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 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN

The concept of jurisdiction came to be used to define the scope of

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the European Convention on Human Rights’ in F Coomans and MT Kamminga (eds),

‘guarantee’ to ‘accord’ is explained.  TP III –.

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 

It is now established that this Article is to be taken as imposing, in gen-

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 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN

rights protection is to be furthered the fundamental issue is one of

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 López Burgos v Uruguay HRC  July , Communication No /, UN Doc

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 

bases of jurisdiction being exceptional and requiring special justification in

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 Banković (n  above) para .

mention Art . The jurisprudence is discussed below ‒.

Declaration Under Article  of the European Convention on Human Rights’ in M Novak,

 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN

which provided that: ‘The provisions of this Convention shall be applied

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An adequate jurisprudence as to the reach of the Convention needs to

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 

of extension is, presumably, to bring them ‘within the jurisdiction’ so far

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 But not one operating under Art  (now ).

 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN

whose international relations the Contracting Party was responsible, but

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CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 

of dependent territories conventionally recognized in UK law—colonies,

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Roberts-Wray (n  above) –, –, –.

above) –, , , .

 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN

Under the first interpretation, the metropolitan or home territory (how-

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Arguably, however, a protectorate; see n  above.

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 

part of the dominions of the Crown, and in UK constitutional law they

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 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN

condominia, but also to exclude other dependencies, for example Crown

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Under ordinary principles it is legitimate to use the Travaux Préparatories

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 

of Justice. Norway also had sovereignty over Bouvet Island in the

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 GHOSTS OF COLONIALISM IN THE EUROPEAN

of representative government. Some were more and some less advanced

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 See generally HREE (n  above) –.  Roberts-Wray (n  above) –.

CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS 

Convention. The Netherlands had lost its empire in South-East Asia.