The chapter introduces the concept of Earth’s amphibious transformation—the technological and socio-political extension of the human habitat onto sea surfaces since the mid-20th century. It frames this transformation as a key driver of the oceanic Anthropocene, characterized by intensified vertical interactions with spatial layers above and below the sea surface, reaching from fossil fuels beneath the seabed to outer space. Through oil platforms, wind turbines, mariculture cages, offshore rocket launches, and many other types of artificial islands, marine regions have become central to developmentalist agendas and environmental degradation concerns. The chapter establishes two interrelated analytical perspectives: an oceanic-vertical one that reveals new artificial islands’ upward and downward-oriented access to spatial layers, and a terraqueous-horizontal one connecting these artificial islands to coastlines. Ultimately, reorienting our gaze toward the ocean, the chapter proposes a paradigm shift in recognizing the central role of many marine regions in the Anthropocene, emphasizing artificial islands as both symptom and agent of anthropogenic transformations of planetary scale.

The chapter continues to focus on multispecies interactions. Dual-habitat built environments remain central to the analysis, but with an emphasis on species translocations and their impacts on biosphere integrity. The chapter addresses the questions of how and why hard surface structures made from steel or concrete, particularly offshore oil and gas platforms, became new and important vectors for marine bioinvasions in the oceanic Anthropocene. In such bioinvasion cases, a species multiplies exponentially in a new ecosystem, dominating it in terms of biomass or density. Slowly moving or stationary structures opened entirely new marine regions to marine bioinvasions and created novel material conditions for them. The use of new hard surface floating structures along coastlines or further offshore supplanted wooden structures and their previous habitat conditions. New bioinvasion pathways emerged through convergence with coastal urbanization and industrialization during the second half of the twentieth century, adding more hard surfaces such as water intake tunnels, piping systems, and seawalls—and now also interacting with offshore wind turbines, floating buildings, and others.

Over decades of reviewing individual communications, the Human Rights Committee (HRC) has developed greater consistency when shifting the evidentiary burden between the author and the state in its decisions on individual communications. The grounds on which this shift is made, including the nature of the allegations, the evidence used to corroborate the allegations, and the extent to which the state engages with the process, seem to impact the articulation of the shifted burden in certain cases. To effect this burden shift, the chapter explains that the HRC appears to follow three steps when assessing claims of a breach of the prohibition against torture: (1) the allegations must be corroborated by some level of evidence; (2) the HRC applies a rebuttable presumption that the author’s alleged facts are true; unless (3) the state offers evidence in direct response to the specific allegations of torture.

Human rights violations often form part of a pattern or practice of violations, rather than being purely isolated incidents. This context is not consistently taken into account by UNTBs during individual case consideration, however. This chapter explores several ways in which awareness of human rights violations’ embeddedness in wider contexts of violations should inform UNTB practice. In particular, the chapter considers the impact, or potential impact, of patterns and practices of violations on the manner in which UNTBs receive information, and the sorts of sources they recognize in their decisions; on UNTBs approaches to the exhaustion of domestic remedies and the burden of proof; on case structuring; and on findings, recommendations and follow-up procedures. The chapter ends by observing that UNTBs are not only receivers but also key disseminators of information, and suggests ways in which their findings as to the patterns and practices of violations may be more effectively disseminated.

Pushbacks are designed to prevent people on the move from accessing procedural and/or substantive legal safeguards. States thus tend to deny practising them and actively erase evidence of their occurrence. The resulting acute evidentiary challenges in any subsequent human rights litigation require adjustments to be made to the evidentiary framework. This chapter offers a four-branch matrix of what can logically happen to facts disputed in litigation. It then proceeds to critically examine how evidentiary issues have been handled in UNTB pushback case law, concluding the right findings have been made, but on a generally weak reasoning. The chapter finally stresses that the burden of proof should be shifted from complainant to state when two conditions are met: a context-proven to a high standard, such that the state can be presumed to have violated human rights; the complaint is linked to this context – with this proven prima facie. If the linkage is evidenced to a higher standard, the factual allegations must be recognised as established on the strength of the evidence –without any shift being alluded to, so as to avoid an upward slippage in the purposefully low standard of proof applied.

This chapter addresses evidence-related recommendations for the consideration of the UN treaty bodies. Written by three practitioners from the civil society sector, with direct experience of the individual communication procedure before the UNTBs, it also benefited from input from all the contributors to the volume, which it concludes. Part I offers normative reflections. It deals with legal questions, including: What should the applicable standard be when determining human rights claims? How should this standard vary according to the type of claim and the stage of the proceedings? In what circumstances and under which conditions should the burden of proof be shifted from the complainant to the respondent state? Part II deals with organisational, and thus more mundane issues, but it highlights how proper identification and communication of the applicable evidentiary concepts and norms are essential to a transparent, accessible and fair system, therefore necessitating proper resourcing.

The chapter explores the phenomenon of ocean-to-land globalization, a shift in global production that increasingly relocates industrial activities to aquatic surfaces while consumption remains land-based. It argues that advances in radiocommunication and radionavigation technologies since the mid-twentieth century were critical enablers of this transformation. By dramatically reducing communication and transport costs, these technologies removed the geo-ontological association of marine regions as remote peripheries to terrestrial centers of production. From a cybernetic viewpoint, extending human audiovisual senses through radiocommunication and radionavigation technologies—including radio telegraphs, radiophones, communication satellites, Decca, or GPS—enabled offshore production sites—such as oil rigs, salmon farms, and rocket launch platforms—to function similarly to terrestrial centers. The post-WWII civilian proliferation of such technologies was the essential enabler for reconceptualizing industrialized marine regions and their artificial islands as inhabited spaces and as new production centers in ocean-to-land globalization.