The Impact of U.N. Human Rights Commission Reform on the Ground: Investigating Extrajudicial Executions of Honduran Street Children
![handle is hein.journals/frdint29 and id is 826 raw text is: NOTES
THE IMPACT OF U.N. HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION
REFORM ON THE GROUND: INVESTIGATING
EXTRAJUDICIAL EXECUTIONS OF
HONDURAN STREET CHILDREN
Caroline McHale*
INTRODUCTION
The issue of street children implicates a series of social and
legal challenges, including discrimination, drug abuse, mistreat-
ment, poverty, public health, and violence.1 The problem re-
mains especially acute in Central and Latin America, where ur-
ban streets and spaces double as homes for roughly forty million
children.2 Honduras, in particular, faces one of the most urgent
* J.D. Candidate, 2007, Fordham University School of Law; Writing & Research
Editor, Volume XXX, Fordham International Law Journal; B.A., 2003, Barnard College of
Columbia University. The author sincerely thanks Professor Jeanmarie Fenrich, Re-
becca Kahan, Shane Kelbley, Rosa Morales, Kate Suvari, and Jesse Mockrin for their
assistance. The author also thanks her family and friends for their encouragement and
support.
1. See HUMAN RIGHTS WArCH [HRW], EASY TARGETS: VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN
WORLDWIDE 14 (2001), available at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/children/chil-
dren.pdf (last visited Mar. 12, 2006) (noting that street children face significant vio-
lence at hands of authorities more than other children; that street children are some-
times tortured and killed; and that street children are easy targets for violence because
they are often impoverished and do not know their rights); see also Selina Kossen, Five
Murdered Street Children in Guatemala: A Precedent Before the Inter-American Court of Human
Rights, 6 HUM. RTS. BR. 11, 11 (1999) (stating that street children often come from
unstable and impoverished families and suffer from malnutrition, drug abuse, and hun-
ger); Timothy J. Treanor, Note, Relief for Mandela's Children: Street Children and the Law
in the New South Africa, 63 FoRDHAM L. REv. 883, 883 (1994) (describing how street
children's problems are similar throughout world, including arbitrary murder, begging,
depression, drug dealing, glue sniffing, homelessness, hunger, illness, malnutrition,
physical abuse, and sexual abuse).
2. See Lynn D. Wardle, Parentlessness: Adoption Problems, Paradigms, Policies, and Pa-
rameters, 4 WHIrrTIERJ. CHILD & FAM. ADvoc. 323, 325 (2005) (citing UNICEF estimates
that there are approximately 100 million street children throughout world, with forty
million in Latin America); see also Sara Dillon, Making Legal Regimes for Intercountry Adop-
tion Reflect Human Rights Principles: Transforming the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child with the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, 21 B.U. INT'L L.
179, 184 (2003) (mentioning Honduran non-governmental organization (NGO) esti-
mates that there are approximately forty million street children in Latin America);
Marc D. Seitles, Effect of the Convention on the Rights of the Child upon Street Children in Latin
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