152 Dictating the Internet: tasked with dealing with these contemporary problems, and integrate national, regional and international perspectives on tackling these globally relevant challenges and establishing effective remedy and accountability mechanisms. vi. Application beyond frontiers The sixth commonality evident from the legal frameworks covered in this report is the attempt to reach beyond national frontiers. Laws which had in previous decades been promulgated, interpreted and applied to written or spoken expression or published writing or imagery within a country, have been increasingly applied to information which originates from outside a State’s territory. These laws have also been sought to break down the distinction between public and private, communications – by conflating expression on publicly accessible and private (including encrypted) platforms. International human rights law is clear that States’ obligations under the international framework extend not only within their territory but also extraterritorially – States have obligations to respect, protect and fulfil human rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights, in situations over which they exercise authority or effective control, whether or not such control is exercised in accordance with international law, as well as in situations over which State acts or omissions bring about foreseeable effects on the enjoyment of human rights, whether within or outside its territory.583 Extraterritorial application Though only some laws like Singapore’s POFMA and Vietnam’s LOCS explicitly provide for extraterritorial application, the other laws covered in this report also engage concerns about extraterritorial impacts on individuals who are not physically within a national jurisdiction. Given the global nature of the internet, censorship within a certain jurisdiction necessarily engages the rights to freedom of expression or information of individuals situated outside of that territory, who seek access to such information. This is especially evident with respect to online news websites – which are not only read by people within a country – and where access 583 This was affirmed by the UN Human Rights Committee in its General Comment No. 31, the Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States (see footnote 83), and the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights in his 2014 report on the right to privacy (see footnote 52). See also ICJ, ‘Protecting Human Rights Beyond Borders’, 25 November 2012, Available at: https:// www.icj.org/protecting-human-rights-beyond-borders/; UN Human Rights Committee, ‘General Comment No. 31 - The Nature of the General Legal Obligation Imposed on States Parties to the Covenant’, 26 May 2004, CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add. 13.