Recent legislative reforms in Egyptian family law have given paramount importance to the protection of the 'best interests of the child' in custody cases. The 2008 amendments to the 1996 Child Law set this course, later entrenched in the 2014 Constitution, when the best interests of the child made their first appearance in a constitutional provision. However, no definition of what constitutes the 'best interests of the child' is provided in these texts. The law, on the other hand, assigns significant powers to judges to allow them to ascertain such an interest on a case-by-case basis by prioritising different conflicting interests.