Domestic violence and child participation: contemporary challenges for the 1980 hague child abduction convention

ABSTRACT

This article addresses two contemporary challenges for the 1980 Hague Child Abduction Convention: (i) domestic violence and (ii) child participation. It also outlines three components of a global socio-legal policy and research initiative undertaken to address these issues and, where relevant, their intersection. The published literature on these topics, including the children’s objections exception, is explored, as are the ways in which these challenges are addressed within some of the 101 Contracting States to the Convention and through the Guide to Good Practice on Article 13(1)(b) of the Convention. Regard is paid to the data provided by the statistical analysis of applications made under the Convention in 2015 by Lowe and Stephens, and the changes which will occur once the Recast of The European Brussels 11a Regulation comes into operation. The likely impact for 1980 Hague Convention abduction proceedings of the UK having left the European Union at 23.00 GMT on 31 January 2020 is contemplated. Other current international initiatives are discussed, including the development of a child-friendly version of the Convention through The International Association of Child Law Researchers. Training is a key to changing attitudes and upskilling family justice professionals to ensure the Convention operates in a fully child-centric way. This will maintain and strengthen the Convention by keeping it ‘fit for purpose’.     

Regional Italian allele frequencies at nine short tandem repeat loci

An Italian population study was performed on the loci D3S1358, vWA, FGA, TH01, TPOX, CSF1PO, D5S818, D13S317, D7S820 and a portion of the X-Y homologous gene Amelogenin for gender determination using the AmpFlSTR Profiler kit (PE Biosystems, Foster city, CA). This study was done on a population of 618 unrelated Italian individuals from 18 regions in Italy (except for Valle d'Aosta and Sardinia) to determine allele frequencies for each STR locus, and to evaluate STR technology for developing an Italian Offender DNA database.     

The Spiritual Components of Restorative Justice

The concept of spirituality in restorative justice practice is recognized as important but is often fuzzy and vaguely understood. This study did a content analysis of restorative justice texts and found nine distinct components of spirituality: transformation, connectedness/belonging, common human bond, repentance, forgiveness, making right a wrong, balance/harmony, rituals, and unexplained spiritual phenomenon. The conceptual clarification of the relationship between spirituality and restorative justice gives mediators/facilitators of restorative justice dialogue more tools to deepen their interactions with victims, offenders, and community members. Furthermore, delineation of these nine components offers researchers a framework for the development of instruments or tools that can be used to assess participants' experiences in restorative justice dialogues.     

Constitutional courts as arbiters of post-conflict territorial self-government: Bosnia and Macedonia

Constitutional and supreme courts frequently end up examining the political and legal questions at the heart of peace agreements and post-conflict constitutions. Where a peace agreement has included territorial self-government (TSG) provisions courts are often endowed with the capacity to adjudicate disputes between state and sub-state levels of government. The effectiveness of courts in fulfilling this role as not been comprehensively examined. This article fills this important gap examining whether the results of existing research on the role of constitutional and supreme courts in resolving disputes in traditional federalism also apply in these particular circumstances. It finds that where TSG is used as a conflict management mechanism judicial review can have centralizing tendencies if this occurs it can largely be attributed to the processes used to select though the devolutionary multinational nature of the states is also relevant.     

Marriage: Cause or mere indicator of future earnings growth?

The hypothesis that marriage increases men's earnings has contributed to legislative support for the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI). However, previous studies of this phenomenon have not controlled for many relevant characteristics that select men into marriage, nor have they focused on low‐income, unmarried fathers—the population targeted by HMI. We use the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which measures many previously unobserved confounders, to test for a relationship between marriage and earnings. We use a variety of analytic strategies to control for selection (including differencing and propensity scores) and find no evidence of an effect of transitions to marriage on the earnings of unmarried fathers that differs from zero, either for the full sample or subsamples defined by race‐ethnic category and baseline cohabitation status. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.