Litigating the rights of street children in regional or international fora: trends, options, barriers and breakthroughs.

This article focuses on the fate of street children and interactions between street children and international law and international institutions. The landmark November 1999 decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Villagran Morales v. Guatemala, provides the basis for this article. Villagran Morales was the very first case in the history of the Inter-American Court where the victims of human rights violations were children, and the first case ever involving street children before an international adjudicatory body. This article examines the significance of this decision for street children.

A world which abandons its children in the streets has no future; it no longer renders it possible to create and develop a project of life.... A world which tries to ignore the precariousness of the human condition inspires no confidence.... It is a world wherein each one survives amongst a complete spiritual disintegration. It is a world that has become simply dehumanized, and which today needs urgently to awake to the true values. (1)

--Judge A.A. Cancado Trindade, The Inter-American Court of Human Rights

INTRODUCTION

On November 19, 1999, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in Villagran Morales v. Guatemala, (2) rendered a landmark decision in which the Court found the Republic of Guatemala in violation of several provisions of the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights ("IACHR") (3) on account of the 1990 abduction, detention, and/or murder of five street youths (three of whom were minors). On May 26, 2001, the Court awarded damages totaling $508,865.91 against Guatemala in favor of the surviving relatives of the murdered children. (4) The Villagran Morales case was significant for two reasons. It was the first case involving street children ever to come before an international adjudicatory body. (5) It was also the first case in the history of the Inter-American Court in which the victims of human rights violations were children. (6)

Focusing on the Villagran Morales decision and drawing on subsequent discussion with the National Director of Casa Alianza Guatemala (one of the organizations that filed the petition in the Villagran Morales case), this Article examines the effectiveness of litigation before international human rights tribunals as a strategy for protecting the rights of street children across the globe. (7) This inquiry is relevant because more than six years after this landmark decision, the plight of street children in Guatemala, other Latin America countries, and other parts of the developing world remains bleak. (8) However, international human rights litigation frequently involves difficult choices and trade-offs, and the rewards for the actual victims of abuse often come at a cost. In the context of limited resources, advocates must evaluate the wisdom of pursuing litigation before a regional or international human rights tribunal at the expense of diverting resources from alternative advocacy strategies and important social welfare programs for street children.

In this Article, I argue that international human rights litigation can be a powerful means of political expression and community mobilization for abused and victimized children in developing countries and can result in precedent-setting interpretations of core treaties affecting the rights of children. However, the potential for such litigation to bring about tangible changes in the living conditions of street children is limited by a number of factors, particularly weaknesses in international human rights laws and processes. Moreover, international human rights litigation hardly addresses the core factors that contribute to the street children problem and that frequently shape the experiences of street children, such as underdevelopment, systemic poverty, economic disparities, armed conflict, inequitable socio-economic structures, and discriminatory attitudes--especially discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity.