Local Images of Global Child Rights: CRC in Taiwan

Abstract

Globalization has brought about cross-border socio-cultural, politico-economic and technological exchanges while instantaneous communications have allowed knowledge and culture to be shared around the world simultaneously. Thus “global law” denotes the cross-border development of legal norms that involve a transnational legal culture of a pluralistic nature. In the trend of globalization, general rules of international conventions and treaties are adopted as local laws to accelerate national development. Socio-legal research has observed that global legal rules and concepts function in radically different ways in various local contexts. This draws our attention to how international rules are enforced by national legislation in books vis-à-vis the living law in local practice. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is a manifest of global law on children’s rights with 198 state members. Although Taiwan is not a UN member, the “Enforcement Act of the Convention on the Rights of the Child” (the Act) of 20 November 2014 has mandated self-executory effects of the CRC provisions on child rights as national laws. This chapter aims to review how the CRC has been integrated into Taiwan’s laws and social practices since its promulgation in 1989. It also attempts to observe the differences made by the 2014 CRC Enforcement Act to promote the rights of children in Taiwan and to examine how the global law principles of the CRC can be implemented in an East Asian, Confucian society. The development of global law calls for a new methodology for comparative study that requires joint efforts by cross-border interdisciplinary experts.