As far as the right to life is concerned, this duty generates an obligation to protect, which in turns translates into a twofold obligation to prevent violations and, once violations have occurred, to investigate the circumstances that led to the relevant breach. Under human rights law States bear a general duty of diligence which requires them to ensure respect for fundamental rights. Duty to investigate right to life violations under human rights law In so doing, this contribution will try to identify a common denominator characterizing the recalled judgments, detecting it in a functional-contextual approach to the duty to investigate and concluding that the ensuing obligation is not unrealistic, even in times of armed conflict, since it is inherently flexible and context-specific.Ģ. The following analysis will unveil the existence of some issues that hinder an unmodified transposition of investigative standards elaborated for peace situations to contexts of armed conflict it will analyze decisions of human rights bodies that have tackled and partly overcome some of those critical issues it will try to detect challenges that still remain and to envisage a coherent theoretical framework applicable to varying scenarios and capable of leading to satisfactory results in any such case.

The purpose of this contribution is to explore the source of those parameters, what they entail in terms of practical activities that States are bound to carry out in order to satisfy their duty to investigate, and verify how they apply to situations of armed conflict. International human rights courts and quasi-judicial mechanisms have played a fundamental role in establishing criteria that apply to the conduct of investigations in cases concerning the loss of life. Due to these differences, the question remains as to which standards should govern investigations in times of armed conflict, when both legal regimes find simultaneous application. These parallel obligations, however, are triggered in different ways and shall satisfy different parameters, depending on which of the two corpora juris is taken into account. Under both international human rights law and international humanitarian law States have an obligation to investigate, prosecute and punish those responsible of particularly severe conduct. An essential protection of the right to life consists of the duty to investigate its violations. The right to life is often referred to as the foundational right insofar as ‘when is not respected, all the other rights lack meaning’.

The right to life i arme conflict