Wouter Vandenhole

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• PhD in law
• Professor (Full) at University of Antwerp

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. This Advanced...

This paper offers a snapshot of the way law and development is taught in the ‘Sustainable Development and Global Justice’ module taught at the Law Faculty of the University of Antwerp, Belgium. The first section highlights four interrelated dimensions, that is programme design, learning outcomes, staff profiles and teaching methods, and student bod...

Natural scientists have identified nine planetary boundaries. Economists have argued that we are growth-addicted and suggested a rather radical departure from assumptions of economic growth, such as zero-growth or even de-growth. Human rights lawyers have so far not seriously engaged with planetary boundaries and growth agnosticism. The realisation...

De 33ste editie van het Jaarboek zet het thema ‘levensloop’ en de link met armoede en ongelijkheid in de kijker. Over de loop van hun leven maken mensen allerlei gebeurtenissen en kantelmomenten mee, zoals huwelijken of echtscheidingen, geboortes, overlijdens, economische of andere structurele omstandigheden (zoals een recessie, oorlog, …). De leve...

This thoroughly updated second edition presents a comprehensive legal perspective on the inherently interdisciplinary field of children’s rights. Chapters provide an article-by-article analysis of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, including its Optional Protocols, as well as contextualised advice on the interpretation and implementation of...

This chapter offers an interdisciplinary and critical perspective on children’s rights in the context of child and family policies, practices and research. We draw on two disciplines, that is, social work and (human rights) law. We both self-identify as critical children’s rights scholars. We favour a contextualized approach to children’s rights, w...

Migration is one of the frontier areas for rethinking the way in which human rights obligations are typically allocated. Not only is migration externalised and privatised, it is also a consequence of structural global inequalities. But complexity cannot be an excuse for lack of human rights accountability. Nor is there an unchecked mission creep: i...

The realities of migration control, in particular its externalisation and privatisation, challenge the state-centred and territorial nature of the current legal human rights regime. In a post-territorial human rights paradigm, the bases on which human rights obligations can be attributed are diverse and stretch beyond causation-based models. Simila...

This chapter identifies methodological challenges for HRBADs scholarship. It adopts a broad understanding of methodology, including not only the concrete research methods that are applied (desk research, interviews, discourse analysis, …) but also the modes of research, disciplines involved and the theoretical and normative framework(s) that inform...

What if we could get back to the drawing board in human rights law? What would be the most decisive game changer? For some, it may be adding new rights or reframing existing rights. For others, it may be rebuilding the institutional architecture for monitoring and accountability. Both have their merits. Nonetheless, in my view, a return to the foun...

The implementation of international human rights laws at the national and local levels relies on the framing of norms. Recent research has shown that international norms regarding child marriage have shifted from setting a minimum age limit to building the agency of girls to resist the practice, which can be either active or passive. Active agency...

This is the 2023 edition of the annual yearbook on poverty and inequality published by the University of Antwerp Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (Belgium). This year's thematic focus is on multilevel governance in poverty policy (implementation).

The civil war in Syria caused several hundreds of young people from Belgium and the Netherlands to join ISIS in Syria. Since a couple of years, the main question is how to deal with the children of those Syrian fighters. This contribution examines whether those children are modern exiles, or whether they are fully covered by the extraterritorial hu...

What we mean by human rights remains perhaps too anchored in the international legal frameworks that took shape after the Second World War. Those legal frameworks tend to take a myopic view on human rights duty-bearers. If human rights are to remain relevant for core societal challenges, such as climate change, exploitation of natural resources, or...

Existing literature shows the social perception attached to child marriage is often conflicting with the legal definition. This insight holds the dichotomized view of layering contestation in two levels: the internal community against the external norm change agents of the state and non-state actors. Accordingly, this article attempts to identify t...

The SDGs and human rights topic fits within a broader narrative on human rights and development. Interaction or linkages between human rights and development may occur at least at three different levels: at the level of development discourse, development policy, and development finance. This chapter confines itself by and large to the first two: di...

Due to abuses and irregularities regarding intercountry adoptions into Flanders, the Flemish government established an expert panel in the Summer of 2019. The expert panel had a twofold task: to investigate intercountry adoptions that had taken place in the past, and to formulate recommendations for the future. The expert panel submitted its report...

In dit 31ste Jaarboek kijken we niet alleen naar de armoedesituatie in België, maar verruimen we onze blik naar mondiale mechanismen die armoede en ongelijkheid creëren en in stand houden. Een duidelijke doorwerking van mondiale armoede en ongelijkheid zien we wanneer we ons focussen op de link tussen migratie en armoede, het themadeel van dit boek...

There are no strong reasons for age discrimination exceptionalism in international children's rights law. Age differentiation does not require “very weighty reasons” to be justifiable in the current case-law of the ECtHR, and even if it were, that would not mean that age discrimination should be treated as an exceptional case in human rights discri...

This training manual has been prepared as part of a project that is implemented by the Faculty of Law (FOL) of Mzumbe University (MU) of Tanzania in collaboration with the Law and Development Research Group of the University of Antwerp. The project is entitled “A human rights-based approach to health challenges associated with child marriages in Ta...

The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified core United Nations human rights treaty. Does size matter for normativity and compliance? Size does matter sometimes in a positive way: the quasi-universal ratification of the CRC gives that treaty unprecedented normative legitimacy and legal reach. Often, size adds however a lay...

Drawing on the difference dilemma, this chapter covers the equal rights that children share with adults. It discusses physical integrity (including the prohibition of torture, capital punishment and life imprisonment without parole); the right to privacy, family, home and correspondence; the right to a name and nationality; freedom of expression; f...

The current orthodoxy of human rights law is firmly rooted in a territorial state-centric model: in principle, the primary and only duty-bearer is the territorial state. This myopic understanding of the duty-bearer side of human rights law is increasingly under strain. In many real-life contexts, human rights enjoyment is impacted upon by several s...

As the cover image of this volume suggests, territorially conceptualised human rights obligations often act as an arbitrary wall, beyond which new threats to human rights arise in extraterritoriality (as symbolised by the bird of prey). ETOs provide a window through which to see, assess, and deal with these new threats and, also a window to a more...

This chapter explores whether there is a state duty to provide development cooperation, and a corresponding human right to development cooperation. First, I brush a broad picture of the field of human rights and development, and situate the discussions on human rights and development cooperation within that field. Second, I scrutinize how the debat...

De laatste jaren rezen bij steeds meer interlandelijk geadopteerden vragen over hun adoptiegeschiedenis en de adoptieprocedure. Deze vragen kwamen aan de oppervlakte zowel via verhalen in de pers als via rechtstreekse berichtgeving aan het Vlaams Centrum voor Adoptie. Om gehoor te geven aan de verscheidene vragen en bezorgdheden van geadopteerden,...

In dit hoofdstuk gaan we op zoek naar de concrete betekenis van klimaatrechtvaardigheid tussen en binnen landen, en naar beleidsmaatregelen die een bijdrage kunnen leveren tot meer klimaatrechtvaardigheid. Zowel de klimaatverandering als de mogelijke antwoorden erop zijn nauw verweven met hoe we het menselijke samenleven op aarde organiseren. Hoe w...

International human rights law (IHRL) offers potential responses to the consequences of climate change. However, the focus of IHRL on territorial jurisdiction and the causation-based allocation of obligations does not match the global nature of climate change impacts and their indirect causation. The primary aim of this article is to respond to the...

This article introduces the special issue ‘New Frontiers in Children's Rights: From Protection to Empowermen’. It gives an overview of new frontiers in children's rights. It also takes a historical perspective on children's rights, including on their legalisation to situate the concept of empowerment therein. It then gives an overview of the specia...

Abstract At first sight, child well-being and international children’s rights law have much in common. Specifically, they both focus on a category of human beings defined by age (children), and both are concerned about ‘child flourishing’. Surprisingly perhaps, the word well-being is rarely used in children’s rights work, and it is not very promin...

In light of the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 2019, the twelfth edition of the European Yearbook on Human Rights is dedicated to the rights of the child. In their contributions, renowned scholars, emerging voices and practitioners provide a cross-section of the progress and gaps with regard to the protection of...

Law is (hu)man-made, and bears the imprint of the time and place at which it comes into being. International human rights law is no different. It arose in the aftermath of the Second World War and the holocaust, at a time that the implicit image of a human being was a white, male adult.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 are the new and ambitious global development agenda for the 2015–2030 period. That global agenda can only be realized through a global effort. What does that mean for the division of labour? Traditionally, fostering development has been seen as the primary responsibility of the territorial St...

TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1. Introduction. – 2. Methodology. – 3. Legal Framework. – 4. How Judges Give Substance to the Notion of the Child’s Best Interests. – 4.1. The Understanding of the Hague Convention on Child Abduction's Rationale and Considerations of Jurisdiction. – 4.2. The Situation in the State of Habitual Residence and in the State of Refuge...

The objective of the present Article is to analyze whether there is a tension between the legal framework on the right of the child to be heard and the arguments judges employ in their judgments against the hearing of the child in (non)return proceedings. Thus, the reasoning of judges is critically assessed against what is expected from them based...

In a fair amount of recent development policies, programs, and practices, human rights–based approaches to development (HRBADs) have been introduced by international organizations, donor countries, and nongovernmental organizations. Contrary to grassroots rights struggles induced from below, the adoption of HRBADs by local development organizations...

This Commentary is a fully up-to-date, solid legal work on children’s rights. It offers a contemporary legal perspective on the inherently interdisciplinary field of children’s rights. It responds to the scarcity of legal commentaries in a landscape where several handbooks covering different disciplines have been published in recent years. It is su...

A Commentary on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Protocols (Elgar Commentaries series) This Commentary is a fully up-to-date, solid legal work on children’s rights. It offers a contemporary legal perspective on the inherently interdisciplinary field of children’s rights. It responds to the scarcity of legal commentaries in a lands...