International Human Rights and Governing Land Grabbing: A View from Global Civil Society

The current international responses to the global land grab are insufficient in the sense that they address some aspects of the problem but leave outside their scope important situations of human rights violations and abuses. To address this governance gap, this essay argues for the promotion and application of the right to land as a human right. Globalization in general and the global land grab in particular make it necessary to pay particular attention to the international and transnational dimension of the human right to land. Extraterritorial human rights obligations (ETOs) may turn out to be the missing link for human rights to acquire the conceptual robustness for upholding legal primacy over all other legal regimes such as trade and finance in times of deepening globalization.