This chapter analyses the proposals to improve the governance of responsibility at the state level through civil liability and tort law and criminal law approaches as well as at the supranational level through human rights treaty bodies as well as proposals for international courts such as the World Court of Human Rights and the World Court of Business and Human Rights and international arbitration. The chapter concludes with insights on what child-friendly governance of responsibility means.

A recurring theme is the legitimacy and harmonization of jurisprudence among international courts and tribunals. In this context, an important procedural consideration is so-called forum shopping; a strategy by which litigants pursue parallel or sequential proceedings, among multiple jurisdictions, in order to achieve the most favourable result. This chapter explores the differential treatment of forum shopping between the specialized regimes for human rights and the investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) regime. It contends that the notable contrast between the restrictive rules applicable to individual human rights complaint procedures and the laissez-faire approach of the ISDS regime is instructive as to the place of human rights in the praxis of the international legal order; a procedural privileging of secondary human rights norms such as property rights over the most fundamental jus cogens norms such as the prohibition of extra-judicial executions and torture. The shift from norms to procedures provides a more honest picture of where the contemporary international legal order stands in regard to the fundamental principles that it espouses as unimpeachable axioms.

In the concluding chapter, the editor engages in a comparative and theory-building exercise across the jurisdictions covered in the book. There are important differences between international non-human-rights courts as to the legal basis for their application of human rights norms. While due process rights of the parties appearing before it, and systemic integration, are available for all courts, there are marked differences in issues such as standing by individuals, the status of human rights norms as applicable substantive law or basis for jurisdiction, and the patterns concerning which categories of human rights have made their way into other international courts. There are also clear examples of ‘other’ courts widening the scope of justiciable human rights, for instance through applying economic, social and cultural rights, or the right to property, or collective rights of peoples beyond the practice of actual human rights courts. In their application of human rights norms, 'other' international courts have at least so far tended to do so reflecting more the trend of humanisation, rather than constitutionalisation, of international law.