The Committee on the Rights of the Child’s Admissibility Decisions in the ‘Syrian Camps Cases’ against France: a Critique from the Viewpoint of Treaty Interpretation

Abstract

The article deals with three admissibility decisions by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child where it found that it was competent to consider the merits of individual complaints against France submitted by relatives of French children staying in Syrian prison camps. Paving the way for the Committee subsequently to hold that France had violated the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the decisions are noteworthy for the Committee’s expansive notion of extraterritorial jurisdiction, which also has been adopted in other cases on the same subject, but also beyond. The article highlights two methodological features of the decisions that are closely related, notably their departure from generally accepted principles of treaty interpretation and their alignment with arguments submitted by the third-party interveners. It is argued that these features effectively undercut the authority of the Committee’s practice as source material when subjecting the treaty to legal interpretation.