Legal Semiotics of Silence: The Best Interests of the Child in International Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The best interests of the child (BIC) principle is the centrepiece of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC 1989): all decisions concerning children should be made according to this standard. However, the provision enshrining the BIC in the CRC is characterized by its silence concerning the actual content of this principle: what actually constitutes the best interests of the child in a given situation? Who decides what is best for the child, and according to which standards and guidelines? The meaning of the BIC has been interpreted differently across nations and according to different situations, even within the same jurisdiction, social class, and culture. This article applies legal semiotics theory to explore the meaning of silence in the formulation of the BIC as a significant sign under international law. For this purpose, it refers to Victoria Welby, the British foremother of modern semiotics, and her significs theory, as well as to renowned Hungarian-American semiotician Sebők Tamás’ global semiotics theory, to uncover the many ramifications of the BIC principle for the implementation of children’s autonomy rights at the domestic level.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".