This substantial and excellent book represents a most useful and practical attempt to deal with the wide variety of cross-border legal issues that arise in the context of measures designed to protect adults who are deemed to be vulnerable by reason of intellectual disability, illness, age or a combination of such circumstances. The book is divided into four parts: first, an overview of the subject replete with comparative references; second, a detailed analysis of the Hague Convention on the International Protection of Adults of 13 January 2000 (hereafter ‘the Convention’) itself; third, an exceptionally practical and useful survey of the law and institutions concerning the protection of adults in 41 different legal systems (including legal systems inside and outside the Convention); and fourth, case studies based on nine different aspects of the international legal issues involved in the protection of vulnerable adults. The book also provides generous appendices including: the text of the Convention; the explanatory Lagarde Report on the Convention (Professor Lagarde also provides the Foreword for the book); and a range of other useful supplementary material.

The book is a timely and necessary contribution to practical legal knowledge as it deals with the situations covered by the Convention. The UK is one of the currently nine contracting parties to this important and developing Hague Convention. There are also however, moves afoot within the EU Parliament to encourage greater involvement by the European Union in the Convention; at the moment it seems that such involvement would also be likely to involve the creation of an EU Regulation concerning these matters.

For many potential readers, whether students, academics or non-specialist practitioners, this subject may, however, seem somewhat ‘niche’: this book should dispel this erroneous impression. This book concerns an important and emerging area of law and should be available to every practitioner and also be regarded as a basic purchase by every law library. These bold claims deserve some justification. In the UK the international dimension of the protection of adults has traditionally been concealed behind legal institutions such as trusts and powers of attorney, or obscured by public healthcare provisions. The present trend of events suggests, however, that the Convention is likely to grow in significance as well as in contracting parties. The growth in significance will be a consequence of the societal challenges and legal questions posed by the general increase in life expectancy and hence increased numbers of persons suffering from age-related illnesses and conditions. When these trends are considered in the context of increased personal geographic mobility of adults and their assets, the need for international provisions to address the cross-border operation of measures of protection for vulnerable adults is obvious.

Equally obvious is the inadequacy of many of the solutions that were, prior to the effective advent of the Convention, attempted or extemporized with the intention of providing some form of cross-border effectiveness for such measures of protection. Prior to the Convention, the law concerning the protection of adults tended to be rooted in purely domestic provisions concerning aspects of the private law status of the vulnerable adult. To some extent, the private international law of any foreign venue in receipt might allow certain aspects from the law of the State of origin to travel across its own borders in certain types of legal proceedings. If the issue is considered in this sense, private international law could be argued to have assisted in the receipt (or transmission) of aspects of domestic decisions concerning the vulnerable adult that would otherwise be regarded as sounding only in public or administrative law; this claim should not, however, be overstated. Only the aspects of the foreign decisions that were capable of being converted into an issue that the legal system in receipt would regard as one of private law, that private international law could then itself accommodate, could enjoy this limited form of international effect. Failing such a possibility, the international legal effect of measures of protection for vulnerable adults depends upon the law of evidence and also the wholly domestic legal possibilities provided by the legal system(s) in receipt. Thus the international possibilities without the Convention are limited by, inter alia, the nature of the subject of private international law in the legal system seised (and quite possibly by the equivalent system in any other legal system which might become relevant by means of a renvoi); by difficulties of classification/characterization concerning unknown examples of civil status (eg a profligate) or imperfectly understood legal institutions (eg the Trust); by difficulties of attempting to deal with property (particularly immoveable property) across borders; by differing common law and civil law concepts associated with the law of personal status and capacity; and by the ever present accidents of law and legal procedure in the place in which the vulnerable adult is presently (and quite possibly fortuitously) located.

Though traditionally such ‘niche’ cases certainly provided interesting scenarios for legal specialists that nicely blended issues of private international law and comparative law, they did not (and do not) provide a satisfactory or legally certain method of dealing with the cross-border legal issues increasingly facing vulnerable adults. In this respect the Convention is much to be preferred. The authors and editors of this book have provided a text that must surely be regarded as the locus classicus of its subject in the English language. This book is an indispensable guide to this emerging area of law and is highly recommended.