The Common Core between Human Rights Law and International Criminal Law: A Structural Account

Legal scholars and theorists have recently drawn a more sustained attention to the link between international human rights law (hereafter IHRL) and international criminal law (hereafter ICL). This concerns both positive and more normative accounts of the link. Whether positive or normative, the predominant approach to constructing the link is substantive . This overlap is normatively justified in similar terms by reference to a subset of moral human rights. In this paper, I offer an alternative to the substantive approach. After identifying two flaws in the substantive approach (the problem of threshold and the problem of ethical neutrality ), I defend what I call a structural account by focusing on duty‐holders. I start by reconstructing two structural characteristics common to IHRL and ICL qua international legal regimes: who has the authority to address violations of IHRL and ICL, and who can be liable for those violations. I then infer that public authority (functionally construed) constitutes the common structural core of IHRL and ICL. I rely on the extraterritorial application of IHRL and on the collective dimension of ICL violations to further support the argument. I finally offer an argument explaining the normative point of those structural features. I hold that IHRL and ICL (their adjudicative and liability regimes) are both necessary (but clearly not sufficient) to render this exercise of public authority legitimate to its subjects.