Erga Omnes

Erga omnes is a Latin legal term meaning toward all, describing an obligation or right that is owed to everyone rather than only to specific parties, in contrast to a contractual right that binds only the parties to the contract. The first documented legal use of the term is generally traced to a 1956 article by the Belgian lawyer Henri Rolin, but it entered mainstream international law through the 1970 decision of the International Court of Justice in the Barcelona Traction case. In that decision the Court held that certain obligations, because of the importance of the rights involved, are owed by a state to the international community as a whole rather than to any one other state, and identified the prohibitions on aggression and genocide, along with the basic rights of the human person including protection from slavery and racial discrimination, as sources of this kind of universal obligation. Because an erga omnes obligation is owed to the international community generally, the doctrine allows any state, not only an injured one, to invoke the responsibility of another state for breaching it.