Professor Kele Stewart, co-director of Miami Law’s Children & Youth Law Clinic recently published two articles on international children's rights and immigrant children. In “Implementing the Child Protection Provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Trinidad and Tobago,” published in the University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review, Professor Stewart provides a framework for implementing the child protection provisions of the CRC. Using Trinidad & Tobago as an example, she argues that the CRC requires signatories to prioritize family integrity and that Trinidad & Tobago should leverage its tradition of extended kinship care in developing its new civil child protection system. Her article Unequal Access to Special Immigrant Juvenile Status: State Court Adjudication of One-Parent Cases, published in American Bar Association’s Children’s Rights Litigation addresses Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) status, a path to lawful permanent residency for immigrant children who have been abused, abandoned and neglected. The article examines an issue in which the federal law has been subject to divergent interpretation by state judges, to whom Congress delegated certain predicate factual findings. Professor Stewart concludes that some state courts impermissibly serve as gatekeepers for immigration relief creating unequal treatment among similarly situated vulnerable immigrant children.
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