International legal accountability for an internationally wrongful act resulting from intelligence activities

This chapter focuses on state accountability (i.e., the enforcement of state responsibility) for an internationally wrongful act resulting from intelligence activities. For various reasons, interstate forms of accountability remain unused in intelligence matters. Yet, states are still held to account through other mechanisms. To theorise international practice, I conceptualise international legal accountability. My conceptualisation accounts for non-state actors’ role in the enforcement of state responsibility. In this regard, the concept constitutes the missing part of the regime of invocation of responsibility established in Part Three of the 2001 International Law Commission’s Articles State Responsibility. The original and multidimensional taxonomy of forms of international legal accountability that I propose is of general applicability. In this chapter, however, I also justify the specific necessity of the concept in intelligence matters and further define its objectives in this context.