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This article addresses an age-old haunt of UN peacekeeping missions which has largely been unmet by legal redress. In looking back, it highlights the prevalence of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by UN peacekeepers, which has pervaded almost every mission since the end of the Cold War. In looking ahead, it analyses the reach and restraints of strategic litigation against troop contributing countries (TCCs) by invoking their extraterritorial human rights obligations (ETOs) under the established tests for ETOs in regional jurisprudence. It considers the challenges of trying to squeeze the factual nature of instances of SEA into the traditional tests for establishing ETOs, particularly in cases of transactional or survival sex. In light of those challenges, it argues for such tests to be viewed through a gender, child and rights-based lens by engaging with feminist and contextual considerations of the conflict-affected environments in which SEA thrives. Because transactional sex engages rights under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights directly as basic rights (such as the rights to food and health) are made conditional on sex, this article will also outline that this Covenant may be relied upon as a complementary avenue to the former control-based approach in litigating SEA. This Covenant, along with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the African human rights instruments may provide a promising avenue to invoke ETOs of TCCs for SEA by peacekeepers as they do not contain a ‘jurisdiction’ clause limiting obligations to within a state’s own territory. As such, they do not appear to require exclusive reliance on the traditional tests for ETOs to be applied to extend those obligations abroad. This approach has been explored in detail by Professor Ralph Wilde. Where strict control over individual victims of SEA by UN peacekeepers might be difficult to establish given the varying modes in which SEA can occur, this complementary avenue may not require the satisfaction of the traditional power/control tests in the same manner and thus provides an increased likelihood for victims to obtain an effective remedy.
Keywords: Extraterritorial, Human rights obligations, troop contributing countries, sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, transactional sex, UN Peacekeepers, jurisdiction, International Human Rights Treaties, International Law
How to Cite: Barrett Gannon, I. (2026) “Is Everything Under Control? Strategic Invocation of Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations of Troop Contributing Countries for Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by UN Peacekeepers”, UCL Journal of Law and Jurisprudence. 15(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.2052-1871.2183