This book brings together three crucial issues that directly impact the enjoyment of children’s rights: obesity, unhealthy food marketing and state regulation. In outlining a child rights-based approach to marketing in an age in which advertising to children is ubiquitous, Ó Cathaoir addresses two key questions. First, what obligations under international human rights law do states parties to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) have with regard to addressing food marketing? Second, how should these obligations be enshrined in law and practice?

In providing strongly reasoned and convincing answers to both, she focuses on the prevalent – and growing – phenomenon of child obesity – a phenomenon that simultaneously results from a failure to secure children’s rights and, in itself, constitutes a failure in terms of those rights. Ó Cathaoir focuses on the potential of the UNCRC as a universal, unifying and legally binding framework for EU Member States ‘marketing regulation efforts. In doing so, she pays particular attention to socioeconomic rights and the duties they impose. However, she also addresses elements of the Convention that are central to ensuring children’s rights related to protection, privacy, information, cultural life, freedom from exploitation, autonomy and agency. She makes clear the ways in which these rights are all affected by, and have important implications for, the permissible parameters of potentially rights-harming unhealthy food marketing. As such, her argumentation is rooted in an excellent understanding of the theory and practice of children’s rights.

But addressing unhealthy marketing through regulation is not just about children’s rights. Indeed Ó Cathaoir makes clear the important role that the World Health Organization’s Recommendations on marketing and other guidance have to play in supplementing the UNCRC and the work of international human rights law entities in this area. A further, very valuable aspect of the book is the way in which Ó Cathaoir’s analysis also encompasses the (sometimes competing) obligations of states under international trade and economic law and EU law, as well as other human rights instruments that make provision for companies‘ rights to commercial speech or expression.