Vernacularizing the Best Interests of the Child: Comparative Insights From Three Legal Systems

ABSTRACT The study investigates how the Best Interests of the Child principle in the UN Children's Rights Convention (Article 3) has been adapted in custody disputes in Egypt, Sweden, and Uzbekistan. Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child offers a common normative benchmark, divergent legal cultures shape its domestic meaning: Egypt is governed by religious and state legal norms intersecting with global child rights standards. Sweden represents a Western legal culture emphasizing children's participation in custody disputes. Uzbekistan is influenced by Soviet, Islamic, and Western traditions. Understanding these variations is essential for a transnational child‐rights dialogue. A comparative doctrinal and contextual analysis of national statutes, preparatory materials, and policy guidelines across the three jurisdictions was conducted. Analytical categories were developed inductively to trace how institutional mandates, professional discretion, and socio‐cultural factors inform judicial reasoning. Across all sites, explicit references to the Best Interests of the Child principle were found, yet underlying rationales diverged. Egyptian decisions foregrounded paternal guardianship and religion‐inflected welfare; Uzbek reasoning balanced Soviet‐era developmentalism with Islamic and international norms; Swedish practice emphasized procedural fairness and children's voiced preferences, reflecting limited legislative guidance. The Best Interests of the Child operates as a shared legal vocabulary but is locally reconstructed through the interaction of normative, institutional, and cultural forces. Universalist child‐rights approaches, therefore, require sensitivity to legal pluralism when informing policy or reform. These conclusions advise international monitoring bodies and reform initiatives to account for contextual factors rather than relying on doctrinal uniformity.