Spain where no issue of control

[chandonar0]

The reasoning in the part of the judgment where the ECtHR recapitulated general principles regarding jurisdiction, does not seem to support an understanding that the ‘public powers’ can be a separate model. Rather, the Court assumes that since a state had control over an area, it exercised public powers: ‘[…] a State was exercising its phone number list jurisdiction extraterritorially, when, in an area outside its national territory, it exercised public powers such as authority and responsibility in respect of the maintenance of security.’ (para 104) Somehow inconsistently, this statement is followed by citation to cases, like X. and Y. v

Switzerland and Drozd and Janousek v France and over an area arise, and like Al-Skeni and Others where the core issue was arguably control over the persons.

In sum, the role of ‘public powers’ continues to be unclear for triggering the jurisdiction threshold. Based on M.N. and Others v Belgium, it seems though that it cannot be an independent model without any additional elements of personal or territorial physical control.