Law Commons^™

Female Genital Mutilation And Female Genital Cutting, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or Female Genital Cutting (FGC) refers to a range of harmful traditional practices performed on infants, girls, and women in certain ethnic groups. This article, published in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (David Forsythe, et al, ed., Oxford University Press, 2009) discusses the practices in the context of international human rights law. FGM-FGC, violates a number of international human rights standards, including the right to bodily integrity, the right to life, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the rights of children, and the rights of women and girls to equality and non-discrimination. Nevertheless, …

Emergency Alert: This Is Not A Test! An International Disaster Relief Plan For Protecting Children And Families, Cynthia Mabry

Cynthia R Mabry

There are more than 132,000,000 orphans worldwide. As a result of recent natural disasters in the United States and other countries, the number of orphans has increased. Recent events in the Gulf Coast in the United States, Haiti and Japan showed that thousands of children become separated from their parents or guardians when disasters strike. Family members were scattered during these tragedies. Many children were reunited with their families; but some children were sent to orphanages while others waited in classrooms for their family members to come for them. Many Haitian children were sent to foreign countries far from their …

A Foster Child’S Right To Informed Consent: A Call To Address The Unique Circumstances Of Foster Children, Patricia A. Cross

Patricia A Cross

Foster care is a term used to describe a system that provides for the needs of children who are without a family member willing or able to take care of them. Caregivers certified by the state in which the child resides will often provide for their basic needs. The Code of Federal Regulations defines foster care as a “24-hour substitute care for children outside their own homes.” How foster children may provide informed consent in medical situations is an important issue that has been largely unexplored. Children, in general, lack the competency to provide independent consent for medical decisions and …

Providing Attorneys For Children In Dependency And Termination Of Parental Rights Proceedings In Florida: The Issue Updated, Michael J. Dale

Faculty Scholarship

Florida's system for providing protection and safety to children in the State's child welfare system has changed over the past decade. Regretfully, the changes do not appear to have had a significant impact in two areas: increasing the safety and protection of children in the system' and providing children with independent attorneys to advocate on their behalf. Investigations, lawsuits, grand juries, amendments to court rules, and newspaper articles continue to demonstrate the myriad failures in the Florida system. Two notorious examples hi-lite the shortcomings: the cases of the foster child, Rilya Wilson, who disappeared in 2001, and Gabriel Myers, who …

Children's Oppression, Rights And Liberation, Samantha Godwin

Samantha Godwin

This paper advances a radical and controversial analysis of the legal status of children. I argue that the denial of equal rights and equal protection to children under the law is inconsistent with liberal and progressive beliefs about social justice and fairness. In order to do this I first situate children’s legal and social status in its historical context, examining popular assumptions about children and their rights, and expose the false necessity of children’s current legal status. I then offer a philosophical analysis for why children’s present subordination is unjust, and an explanation of how society could be sensibly and …

A Balancing Act? The Rights Of Donor-Conceived Children To Know Their Biological Origins, Brigitte J. Clark Dr

Brigitte J Clark Dr

Internationally, donor-conceived children’s rights to know their biological origins have been recognised to some extent by the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). With the drafting of the Article 7 (1) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), as supplemented by Article 8, such children’s rights to know their biological origins whist they are children, and not only later as adults, were acknowledged for the first time, though not explicitly. Anonymous sperm donation is now banned in eleven jurisdictions, including Sweden and England and Wales. By contrast, France still does not expressly …

The "Right" To Be Trafficked, Charles Piot

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The post-Cold War dispensation in Togo, West Africa, ushered in a new lexicon of politically salient terms, among them droits de 1'homme. Initially deployed in the early 1990s by members of the political opposition to expose dictatorial abuse, this potent signifier then found its way into society at large and, spurred by NGO support, was taken up by women's groups in struggles over gender inequality. This essay explores droits de l'homme's itinerary in the villages of northern Togo where teenage children embraced the term in proclaiming their freedom from parental control. Ironically, the same children now leave their villages to …

Security Now: Addressing The Needs Of Darfur’S Children, Nicole Judd

Human Rights & Human Welfare

In the Darfur region of Sudan, over 2.3 million children have been affected by the ongoing genocide (UNICEF 2008). Unlike their adult counterparts, children are impacted more severely by the consequences of warfare as they are undergoing a fragile developmental process. While each one of the affected children has had their basic human rights violated in some form, the narrative of trauma differs between groups. Sexually-exploited girls, boy soldiers, unaccompanied children, and those who remain in under-resourced camps have experienced the protracted violence in unique ways. To mitigate the effects of war, each group should receive individualized humanitarian assistance as …

International Adoption: A Way Forward, Elizabeth Bartholet

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Kimberly Lanegran On Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone’S Revolutionary United Front. By Myriam Denov. Cambridge, Uk: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 234 Pp., Kimberly Lanegran

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front. By Myriam Denov. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 234 pp.

Waging Peace For Colombia’S Youth: Countering The Attack On Education, Phil Price

Human Rights & Human Welfare

After nearly five decades of internal armed conflict, Colombia’s children and education system remain firmly under siege. Boys and girls as young as thirteen are pulled out of classrooms and thrown into battlefields. Teachers routinely disappear and/or are subjected to extrajudicial executions. Guerillas, paramilitaries, and the Colombian army all utilize school buildings as posts for their combatants. School zones have become littered with landmines. Child displacement and poverty have reached epidemic levels. In direct contradiction with the Rome Statute and the Colombian Ministry of Defense Directive 30743, the Colombian government is guilty of war crimes by employing children as spies …

The Fourth Amendment Rights Of Children At Home: When Parental Authority Goes Too Far, Kristin N. Henning

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although it is virtually undisputed that children have some Fourth Amendment rights independent of their parents, it is equally clear that youth generally receive less constitutional protection than adults. In a search for continuity and coherence in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence involving minors, Professor Henning identifies three guiding principles—context, parental authority, and the minor’s capacity—that weave together children’s rights cases. She argues that parental authority too often prevails over children’s rights, even when context and demonstrated capacity would support affirmation of those rights. Context involves both the physical setting in which Fourth Amendment protections are sought and the nature of the …