It is Amnesty International’s submission that Article 2 (1) of the ICCPR implies extraterritorial obligations to respect and ensure protected rights and that both the obligations to ensure and respect are to be exercised extraterritorially subject to the “power or effective control over the essence of the right,” and therefore, in the context of surveillance of an individual’s communications, this refers to effective control or power over those communications. This leads to the conclusion that extraterritorial surveillance engages the surveilling state’s obligations to respect the rights to privacy guaranteed in the ICCPR.
