An introduction to the history that made the book possible, the diplomatic context from which it arose, and the authors’ acknowledgements to those who have supported this study.

It is a liberal truism that to live as a citizen in a society governed by “the rule of law” means both to be ruled by law and to be the ruler of law, at least insofar as submission is the consequence of a quasi-contractual or reciprocal exchange of chaos for order. The architecture of the rule of law ideal is built upon foundations of democratic legitimacy and popular sovereignty and, while the task of its authorship and enforcement may be collectively delegated, the fundamental mandate remains – so the theory goes – within the gift of individual citizens. For decades, however, critical scholars have questioned the legitimacy of this account, highlighting delusions of empowerment and the presence of micro-politics that mediate the relationship between what is authored in the name of citizens and the partial interests this may serve.

The concepts of the rule of law and constitutionalism are clearly interrelated, even though they do not mean the same thing or refer to the same phenomena. Although the two ideas are often equated, according to Ten “constitutionalism usually refers to specific constitutional devices and procedures, such as the separation of powers between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, the independence of the judiciary, due process of fair hearings for those charged with criminal offences, and respect for individual rights, which are partly constitutive of a liberal democratic system of government.” And the rule of law, by contrast, “embodies certain standards which define the characteristic virtues of a legal system as such.

Democracy and the rule of law are both “essentially contested concepts” in common use; indeed both are hurrah terms to which virtually everyone these days seeks to lay claim. In this brief chapter, rather than survey contestants I opt for stipulation. My stipulations are intended to be fairly undemanding, indeed deliberately unoriginal. They might well exclude legitimate contenders and not be uncontroversial, but they are intended to reflect not only my own preferences but central themes in long traditions of thought about these matters.1

Chapter 3 examines which states are parties to the 1980 Hague Abduction Convention and why most Muslim Family Law States are not. Second, we use the law and practice of Muslim Family Law States with regard to reservations under human rights treaties to illustrate the dilemmas and issues they are dealing with in this area of law, but we also seek to better understand the policy and approach of these States. We further examine how certain States that are party to the 1980 Hague Abduction Convention deal with children abducted to or from those Muslim Family Law States that are not party to the Convention. Ad hoc methods such as bilateral memoranda of understanding, for example, have been adopted vis-�is certain States in an attempt to replicate in practice the assumptions of the 1980 Hague Abduction Convention without the Convention’s requisite institutional machinery incumbent on its parties. Through this analysis of both the Hague Conference conventions and human rights treaties, the chapter illustrates how both European and Islamic exceptionalisms operate in International Law and animate the international debate on how best to redress parental child abduction cases.

Chapter 7 lays out our conclusions and further sets out our proposals, which may allow more easily the return of abducted children. This relates not only to abductions between Muslim-majority States, on the one hand, and, on the other, Hague Conference States, but also those abductions between Muslim-majority States. Indeed, one matter which has not been alluded to anywhere – that we are aware of – is the fact that it is inconceivable that international parental child abduction is not endemic between Muslim Family Law States. Notwithstanding the absence of any reliable statistics, it cannot be the case otherwise. The analysis in the above chapters, read in conjunction with the country case studies selected, lends itself to not only allowing us to map a route forward with regard to the abductions of children between Muslim Family Law States, on the one hand, and, on the other, Hague Conference States, but also parental child abductions between Muslim Family Law States.

Regulation is of the essence of administrative law, constituting much of the interface between the state and the individual or legal persons. To a greater or lesser extent, and in a myriad of different ways, citizens, small business, large corporate and even multinational enterprises fall into its domain. As prime machinery of governance, regulation has epitomised the contemporary mixing in administrative law of public with private powers: ‘steering not rowing’. As befits a major market-oriented economy, the UK process of regulatory reform in recent times is an archetypal example of domestic administrative law development in a global context.

Behind every theory of administrative law there lies a theory of the state. As Harold Laski once said, constitutional law is unintelligible except as the expression of an economic system of which it was designed to serve as a rampart. By this he meant that the machinery of government was an expression of the society in which it operated; one could not be understood except in the context of the other.