This chapter analyses the indirect judicial application of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the Convention) in Australia, which is a federal state of dualist tradition. The chapter demonstrates the vulnerability of the Convention in a system of parliamentary supremacy where the Convention is not legislatively incorporated and where the Parliament can make laws contrary to it. In this context, the traditional methods of engaging with the Convention have yielded limited results where there was tension with the domestic law, but were more impactful when there was convergence between the two sets of norms, as seen in the family law context. The Convention is also weakened by the absence of a federal human rights statute. The case study of the application of the Convention by the Supreme Court of Victoria shows that human rights statutes that contain child-specific provisions facilitate the judicial application of the Convention. The chapter also illustrates the creativity of the courts, which occasionally engaged with the Convention in sui generis ways, not explicitly acknowledged as formal methods of engagement.

The chapter argues that the domestic judicial application of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the Convention) is important and in need of systematic attention, especially in light of the Convention’s novelty and special features. The chapter shows that in the absence of prior systematic comparative international studies, it remains relevant to study the judicial application of the Convention through the lens of the formal domestic rules that inform the reception of the Convention in monist, dualist, and hybrid legal systems. The chapter also argues that it is not only these formal factors that affect the judicial application of the Convention, but also the domestic structure of reception wherein the Convention is received. The chapter further explains the selection of a heterogenous sample of jurisdictions, consisting of France, Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, and the use of a comparative international law perspective as a theoretical framework for the book.

This chapter analyses the indirect judicial application of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the Convention) in the United Kingdom, a dualist legal system where the Convention has not been fully incorporated through legislation. Although the courts have somewhat engaged with the Convention through the traditional methods (statutory interpretation and the development of the common law), the Convention has been given effect overwhelmingly in the context of the Human Rights Act 1998 (the HRA), and implicitly of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 1951 (the ECHR). The joint application of the Convention with the HRA–ECHR tandem has been both a facilitating and an inhibiting factor in the judicial effect of the former. Like courts in other jurisdictions, UK courts have also applied the Convention in sui generis ways, diversifying thus the opportunities for its usage. The overlap between the Convention and other legal standards makes the assessment of its impact difficult, but it is clear that the application of the Convention is associated with a more child-sensitive judicial reasoning.

The chapter analyses the judicial application of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the Convention) in South Africa, which is a hybrid legal system with both monist and dualist features. The largely successful judicial application of the Convention has been facilitated by the country’s constitution, which contains a provision on children’s rights and generous provisions regarding the judicial application of international treaties. The chapter shows that courts favour the application of the Convention as an interpretation tool for the children’s rights clause in the Constitution, but they neglect other possibilities of engagement, such as self-execution or statutory interpretation. This has resulted in lost opportunities to give judicial effect to the Convention. Courts also engage in sui generis forms of application, which has diversified the means of its application. The impact of the Convention is sometimes difficult to discern because of its overlap with domestic instruments. Nonetheless, the Convention has demonstrated its value added when gaps were found in the domestic law, although most often the influence of the Convention has been subtle and diffuse.

This chapter analyses the direct application of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the Convention) by the Court of Cassation and the Council of State in France, a monist state that has not passed legislation to incorporate or transform the Convention domestically. The chapter highlights the historical contentiousness of the direct application of the Convention, the different approaches taken by the two supreme courts, and the positive impact of the direct application of the Convention once this became more widely accepted. The chapter argues that the direct application of Convention articles gives them a quasi-constitutional status, and permits their mainstreaming into decision-making. It also shows that the direct application of the Convention, and especially of its article 3(1), has added value to judicial reasoning in relation to children. The chapter demonstrates that, contrary to other views, the direct application of the Convention by courts depends to a large extent on factors independent of it rather than on its intrinsic features, such as the alleged weak remedial framework, the generality of its terms, or the formulation of its articles.

The modern state of New Zealand was founded on the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and indigenous Maori tribes. New Zealand’s partly uncodified, partly unwritten constitution is thus structured around questions of indigenous rights and the treaty relationship between the Maori and the Crown. This chapter examines how and why the Treaty and indigenous rights play a fundamental role in New Zealand’s constitutional system, and it uses the example of New Zealand to challenge conventional understandings as to what counts as a “constitution.”

This chapter examines the obstacles to corporate accountability at the international level: unsettled international law regarding the binding and enforceable human rights obligations of business entities, the absence of international enforcement mechanisms to hold economic actors accountable, and the related lack of international pressure on states to deliver to victims of corporate complicity their rights to truth, justice, remedy, and guarantees of non-repetition.

It looks empirically at when and why international and foreign courts advanced corporate accountability and when they have not. Second, it discusses power and politics obstacles to the development of the key elements of international pressure: international enforcement mechanisms, binding human rights obligations in international law, and international accountability agency. It concludes with the argument that the absence of international pressure has not blocked corporate accountability. Instead, corporate accountability is underway via domestic processes in the Global South.

Agreements about reciprocal recognition of patent rights between nations were at the heart of discussions at the International Union for the Protection of Industrial Property held in Paris in 1883. Yet while some treat the so-called “Paris Union” as a starting point for the subsequent globalization in patent rights, the context of early attempts at patent law harmonization was international tension and disagreements. Divergences in patent laws have their roots in the strong heterogeneity manifest among national patent systems developing before 1883. The sheer diversity of patent systems available was indeed highlighted by those critics who sought the abolition of patents rights. The project of harmonization should thus be seen as a defensive response to critics of patenting per se, rather than as the advent of a natural process of legislative convergence. In looking at the 1883 Convention in this light, we see that negotiations there can only be understood in terms of a strong rivalry between the French and German models. Such rivalries continued to characterize the membership of the Paris Union even into the interwar period, raising major doubts about whether the project of harmonization could ever be completed.

The co-construction of “industrial property” law and the culture of invention in Greece occurred most prominently from the first patent law of 1920 up to World War II. I unravel the political and industrial contexts of the emergence of Greece’s first patent law, focusing on the role of engineering figures both in framing patent rights as a privilege conferred upon inventors and in pressing toward new legislation. The resulting 1920 patent law was an incomplete attempt to represent the legal status of patents in terms of rights rather than of privilege. The new Greek law that emerged was thus a compromise between ideological pressures for homogenization and the need to innovate through imitation. Overall this chapter contextualizes this development within the impact of transnational patent legislation in constructing a culture of propertization of knowledge and more particularly in techno-science in Greece. The research is based mainly on published archival material most importantly on technical and legal journals, public press, and legal books of the period.