Using the Organization of American States to End the Abuse of Restaveks

The article describes the restavek system, in which Haitian children are placed with host families and work without pay, and traces it to Haiti's slave history, poverty and cultural attitudes. It states that Haitian law, including the 1987 Constitution, the Labor Code, the 2003 Act and the Penal Code, prohibits the practice in theory but is weakly enforced because of limited funding, corruption and a dysfunctional judiciary. It finds that NGO efforts, the ILO and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child cannot compel compliance or offer individual complaint mechanisms.

It argues that the restavek system violates Articles 6 and 19 of the American Convention on Human Rights and that a petition could go through the Inter-American Commission to the Inter-American Court, whose jurisdiction Haiti accepted in 1998. The author proposes a list of orders for the Court, including amending the 2003 Act, funding child protection agencies and publicizing the law. She also proposes a temporary program modeled on Liberia's GEMAP, with international experts in MAST and the IBESR.