Contemporary Private International Law: Perspectives from the 2026 Hague Academy Summer Course

Dário Moura Vicente (DMV): My course explored the tension between unity and diversity that characterizes contemporary private international law.

For over a century – through the Hague Conference and regional bodies like the EU – the discipline has moved towards harmonization. Yet comparative analysis reveals persistent divergences in how cross-border situations are resolved – divergences rooted in national legal traditions and intensified by today’s political and economic fragmentation.

My course sought to trace the roots of these divergences and argued that opposing approaches can yield compromises bridging legal traditions, which are essential to the legal certainty international trade requires.

Giesela Rühl (GR): In my course we looked at a pressing question at the intersection of human rights and private (international) law: should companies bear responsibility for the protection of human rights in their supply chains? Legal systems struggle with the answer to this question. Since companies are legally independent and separate from their subsidiaries, suppliers and business partners they are additionally considered to be under no legal obligation to watch out for what their subsidiaries, suppliers and business partners are doing including whether they comply with local laws, regulatory standards or human rights. However, in recent years things have begun to change. Inspired by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, many states – not only, but particularly in Europe – have turned towards binding regulatory strategies aimed at strengthening corporate responsibility for human rights in global supply chains. This shift has materialised most visibly in the adoption of supply chain laws, which impose mandatory human rights due diligence obligations on companies with regard to their own operations and, to varying degrees, the operation of their suppliers and business partners. In addition, national courts have begun to play a more active role in shaping supply chain accountability through exploring the potential of private law, particularly tort law for the protection of human rights around the globe.

Against this background, the course examined the emerging landscape of supply chain regulation focusing on and critically engaging with the role of private law to protect human rights. We explored whether and under what conditions companies can be held liable for violations of human rights in their supply chains. And we analysed the challenges that necessarily arise on the level of private international law and international civil procedure in this context. Most importantly, we critically examined whether current regulatory strategies will genuinely enhance respect for human rights in global supply chains – and whether existing rules of private international law allow victims of human rights violations to seek justice.

DMV: The current erosion of multilateralism has become a chief obstacle to unification. The 2019 Hague Judgments Convention illustrates this: the US and Russia signed but have not yet ratified it, and China never signed.

Even well-crafted instruments cannot overcome divergence without political will from major economic powers. Nevertheless, unification remains essential to global economic stability, and the ideal behind the Hague Conference’s founding remains as relevant as ever.

GR: One of the most significant developments is that private international law has moved from the margins to the centre of the debate on business and human rights. As states increasingly regulate the overseas activities of companies and victims seek remedies before courts in the companies’ home states, questions of jurisdiction and applicable law have become crucial for the implementation of the (ambitious) human rights agenda of many (European) countries including the European Union. As a consequence, private international law is no longer a technical (and value-neutral) discipline. It defines whether victims of human rights abuses have meaningful access to justice.

DMV: I expect the course to clarify where and why national legal traditions diverge, and how far international unification can bridge them – while also exposing the limits of formal instruments like conventions and the growing importance of soft law in drawing traditions together.

Ultimately, I hope it affirms private international law’s role in securing coordinated pluralism: bringing national legal systems into dialogue across borders while preserving their individuality, a role better served the more the discipline itself is unified internationally.

GR: I want to raise awareness that law is a powerful instrument for shaping social and economic relationships – but that it also has its limits in a legally fragmented world. In addition, I want to emphasize that lawyers must take into account both the likely responses of those who are subject to legal rules and the broader societal consequences of the rules they advocate. If we want to bring about meaningful social change through law, only a holistic, evidence-based approach can ultimately produce legal rules that address problems effectively rather than merely symbolically.

More broadly, I hope to encourage young scholars to engage with politically sensitive topics. Debates about business and human rights are often highly polarized, at times even emotional Rigorous, fact- and evidence-based academic analysis is, therefore, more important than ever. Scholarship provides orientation: it requires us to examine evidence carefully rather than reach premature conclusions, and it promotes a discourse grounded in transparent assumptions and reasoned arguments rather than emotions or political rhetoric. In this way, rigorous legal research not only contributes to better legal rules and judicial decisions, but may also strengthen the quality of public debate.