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The research agenda on Human rights: A Common Responsibility explores the extent to which international human rights law seeks to impose obligations across and beyond State borders and on duty bearers other than the State. 

 
The research line focuses on three alternative ways of constructing a common responsibility for human rights: 

Global human rights obligations

Human rights have traditionally been framed from a vertical perspective, with States' duties confined to those on their territory. This territorial paradigm has achieved particular prominence in political philosophy, but also in the interpretation of international human rights conventions, although there is language in many of these treaties that would provide a broader scope of application.

In this research line, we seek to future-proof international human rights law, in order to ensure that it can act effectively as a corrective to abuses of power and failures by a variety of actors that exercise power. From 2010 to 2015, the emphasis was on developing a general conceptual framework. This research was undertaken in the context of the European Research Networking Programme GLOTHRO, and resulted in several edited volumes with leading publishing houses (Cambridge, Routledge, SAGE, Brill). In the next five years, the general conceptual framework was road-tested in case studies on armed groups, international non-state economic actors, business and multi-stakeholder platforms.

From 2020 to 2024, a Scientific Research Network (SRN) on Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations in Practice was initiated. The SRN was a joint effort of the universities of Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, Erlangen-Nürnberg and North Carolina and was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). In 2022, the  was published. In parallel, as part of the i-BOF project "Future-proofing human rights. Towards a thicker understanding of accountability", research was conducted on a thicker understanding of human rights duty-bearers and of unaccountability. 

Since 2024, the research agenda explicitly includes universities as an emerging human rights duty-bearer. 

The right to development 

The Declaration on the Right to Development was adopted in 1986, but the debate about the content and the distribution of the responsibility for the operationalisation of the right to development continues. The research group engages with efforts to implement, conceptualise and codify the right to development. An important contribution has been made to the 2023 draft Covenant on the Right to Development.