According to the agency paradigm enshrined by the 2001 ILC Articles on State Responsibility, private conducts are attributed to a state when they are carried out on the state's behalf or under its tight control. On closer look, this legal framework proves to be unable to deal with state involvement in human-rights violations perpetrated by powerful non-state actors, such as terrorist groups or transnational corporations. These wrongs, indeed, are often put in place with the fundamental contribution of – but not on behalf of (or under the control of) – a state, with the consequence that, under the traditional paradigm, they could not be attributed to the latter. Against this backdrop, the present paper argues that a new secondary norm has been developing that provides that private wrongs are to be imputed to a state if the latter knowingly facilitated (or otherwise co-operated in) their commission. Although international practice will be duly taken into account, the analysis will be focused mainly on US case law concerning corporate liability for international human-rights violations.

United Nations human rights treaties dealing with specific concerns contain provisions in terms of obligations for states, rather than individual rights. This has consequences for the assessment by treaty monitoring bodies of the level of compliance by States Parties. While human rights norms generally impose obligations on states, the opposite is not always the case; not all obligations in human rights treaties contain corresponding rights for individuals. While the ILC Articles on State responsibility address the establishment of state responsibility in contentious procedures established by the regional human rights conventions; they do not take into account other monitoring procedures that exist, in particular under United Nations human rights treaties. These instruments create different mandates for treaty monitoring bodies, under which they can and do examine treaty implementation in much more general terms than would be possible under the contentious procedure. The individual complaint procedure under some of the treaties, the inquiry procedure and the reporting procedure offer possibilities to assess whether states' non-compliance with treaty obligations. This article examines these possibilities in the light of the ILC Articles on state responsibility.