Between December 2025 and February 2026, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Poland completed the first withdrawals from the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (the Ottawa Convention). The Human Rights Council had called for an assessment in April 2025, before any instrument of withdrawal had been deposited; the report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Impact of anti-personnel mines on human rights (the Report), was presented to the Council on 26 June 2026, once all five had left. Its consolation is that international law beyond the Convention still “prohibits the use and transfer of anti-personnel mines, and imposes obligations to conduct mine action” (Report, para 53). That is half true, and the false half matters more. The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which binds all five, reproduces no part of the Ottawa ban. It imposes an obligation of a different kind, whose precautionary shadow, in practice, recaptures part of what that ban protected at home, and none of the part whose costs fall elsewhere.
What the European Convention on Human Rights Recaptures
The recapture runs through Article 2 of the ECHR, whose positive obligation is one of due diligence, read so as not to impose “an impossible or disproportionate burden”: a state must take reasonable measures against risks to life within its jurisdiction that it knows or ought to know of. In Paşa and Erkan Erol v Turkey, where a nine-year-old boy was maimed by a military mine laid on village grazing land, the Strasbourg Court found the measures taken to keep civilians out inadequate, in breach of Article 2. In Albekov and Others v Russia, knowledge alone that mines lay within Russian territory, whoever placed them, obliged the state to endeavour to locate and deactivate them or, failing that, to mark and seal off the area and warn residents comprehensively (paras 79, 85–90). These cases establish that the presence of known mines triggers positive obligations; they do not hold that laying mines breaches Article 2. A state laying mines owes the same precautions, which can suffice: in Sarıhan v Turkey, a twelve-year-old was maimed in a military minefield that was fenced, signposted and guarded, the villagers having been warned, yet the Court found no violation by five votes to two, holding that he had entered knowingly and that complete protection is unattainable given the unpredictability of human conduct (paras 54–56). Article 2 recaptures the fence, not the ban.
The wartime objection does not release these states either. Article 15 permits no derogation from the right to life except for deaths resulting from lawful acts of war, and Article 15(1) confines any derogating measure to what is “strictly required by the exigencies of the situation”. Whatever latitude that affords during hostilities, it does not dispose of the positive obligations arising from the known danger that contamination continues to pose afterwards. The duties bite where these mines will sit: on their own borders, among their own farmers and children, before any conflict and for decades after one. At home, withdrawal frees the laying of mines, not the duty to answer for them.
What It Cannot Reach
Use, however, was never the whole of the ban. Article 1(1) of the Ottawa Convention bound each party, unconditionally, never to develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer anti-personnel mines. That prohibition attached to the conduct itself, wherever its consequences fell. Amended Protocol II to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which continues to bind all five, conditions use and restricts transfer: Article 8 confines recipients to states or authorised state agencies and bars the transfer of anti-personnel mines to a state not bound by the Protocol unless it agrees to apply it, while Article 10 makes the party controlling an area responsible for clearing or maintaining minefields after active hostilities, and requires a party that laid mines where it no longer has control to provide, where permitted, technical and material assistance. The Protocol does not prohibit production, acquisition or stockpiling. Customary humanitarian law applies only to their use in hostilities through Rules 81 (care in use), 82 (recording), and 83 (clearance), not to whether they may be made for sale. Export controls do not close the gap: the European Union’s Common Position on arms exports, as amended in April 2025, requires refusal of a licence inconsistent with “the obligations of Member States under” the Ottawa Convention, obligations the five no longer bear, and otherwise applies case-by-case criteria, including obligations under Amended Protocol II and the Arms Trade Treaty (which reaches mines only where they are “fired, launched or delivered” by the arms it covers) and a clear-risk test for serious violations of international humanitarian law. No instrument binding the five reproduces the comprehensive, conduct-based prohibition. And Poland, Finland and Lithuania are each moving towards domestic production.
Nor can the ECHR supply the missing prohibition, because its jurisdiction turns not on what a state’s conduct causes but, outside its territory, on effective control over an area or authority and control over the person harmed. In Duarte Agostinho and Others v Portugal and 32 Others, the Grand Chamber found neither and refused to rest jurisdiction on the respondents’ contribution to transboundary climate harm, recalling that it has “consistently rejected” jurisdiction based on the impact abroad of a domestic decision, and that jurisdiction requires control over the person, not the person’s interests (paras 184, 195, 205). All five were among the respondents who prevailed. A mine made in Poland and laid by another state in Mali may engage Polish responsibility to other states under arms transfer law, but no ECHR obligation to the farmer it maims.
That is a limit of the ECHR, not of human rights law as such. The Grand Chamber itself noted that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Committee on the Rights of the Child apply a notion of jurisdiction it has not recognised (para 212); the Human Rights Committee reads the right to life to reach those affected by a state’s activities “in a direct and reasonably foreseeable manner” (General Comment No 36, para 63); and the state that laid the mine may owe reparation (Report, para 44). But the Committee’s views do not bind, and none of these routes stops the mine being made. The casualty figures do not prove the jurisdictional point but show why it matters: of 2024 casualties whose status was known, some ninety per cent were civilians, and the heaviest tolls fell in Myanmar, Syria and Afghanistan, none of them ECHR parties; Ukraine, a party, came fourth (Report, para 11).
The Report’s Quiet Overclaim
This exposes a strain. The Report’s leading recommendation urges states to “comply in all circumstances” with “international law prohibiting the use, development, production, other acquisition, stockpiling, retention or transfer of anti-personnel mines” (para 54(a)). The Report’s summary, speaking of “refraining” from these activities, suggests a policy standard. But the recommendation’s operative words ask states to comply with “international law prohibiting” them, and para 54 introduces it with “therefore”, following para 53, which cites no authority. Residual restrictions survive, but none amount to that comprehensive prohibition, and the Report’s own analysis knows it. At para 33, on non-parties, the Report describes the residual law as restrictions on use that fall short of an absolute ban; by para 53, they have hardened into a prohibition on use and transfer; by para 54(a), the prohibition has acquired five further verbs. Even the middle formulation is generous: Amended Protocol II permits conditional use.
The overclaim is revealing rather than careless: the residual regime cannot bear the weight the recommendation places on it, which is why the call for the withdrawn states to rejoin came from the High Commissioner on publication, not from the recommendations. Human rights law is not a substitute for humanitarian disarmament. It is a jurisdictionally bounded remedy for a globally distributed harm. The five have repudiated a prohibition that followed their conduct wherever its consequences fell; the human rights obligations they keep follow their jurisdiction, which reaches beyond their soil only exceptionally, through control of an area or person. The parliamentarians in Denmark, Norway and Sweden who have called for withdrawal should be clear about what is on offer. Not a recovered capability, but a liberty to produce a weapon whose foreign victims, once it is sold, the ECHR they remain bound by does not reach.
