Third party effect of human rights is a topic of interest to legal scholars, who analize the question not only in the context of legal systems of European countries. Scientifi c research has not settled the question of possible qualifi cation of current practice to one of the known theoretical concepts: theories of the direct and indirect third party effect, protective duties of the State and interceding third party effect. Nevertheless, many authors — considering the order to protect human dignity as the source of horizontal validity of fundamental rights — claim, that the third party effect will eventually turn out to be direct, horizontal validity of human rights or, at least, that it cannot be limited only to the infl uence that human rights have on interpretation of civil general clauses and indeterminate collocations. Despite that, the majority of handbooks on human rights accept only the concept of the limited third party effect (the theory of the indirect third party effect), what raises doubt.