Catching Up: The European Court of Human Rights Approximates its Approach to Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Over Digital Surveillance to That of the Human Rights Committee

On 12 September 2023, the fourth section of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or Court) issued its judgment in the case of Wieder and Guarnieri v the United Kingdom1 and found that the United Kingdom (UK) violated the rights of the applicants under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (echr or Convention).The case is significant not for the finding of a violation -in fact, the UK did not challenge that its surveillance practices involving overseas data subjects fell short, at the time, of the requirements of the Convention -but rather for its finding of extraterritorial jurisdiction.This latter holding approximates the approach of the Court to extraterritorial jurisdiction over digital surveillance operations to that of the Human Rights Committee (HRCttee or Committee), and moves the ECtHR closer to embracing a functional approach to extraterritorial jurisdiction: an approach which aligns the geographical reach of the legal obligations of states under the Convention with the actual cross-border operations they engage in and the cross-border impacts they generate.2