Category: The Americas

Good legal help is hard to find.  Particularly for the low-income parents of a sick child who pass countless hours in hospital waiting rooms and at their child’s bedside.  Attorney Lee Ann Chapman told The Star: Having a sick child can bring about a domino effect.  Families sometimes let important, practical issues slide because they’re so focused on their child’s health.  Often they have no idea of their rights and have never had access to legal information.  Sometimes they are quite desperate. Enter The Hospital For Sick Children (SickKids) and Pro Bono Law Ontario (PBLO), who’ve teamed up to deliver

Would it surprise you to learn that, every year in the U.S., thousands of women and girls are forced into marriages against their will?  The recently released results of a national survey conducted by the Tahirih Justice Center revealed more than 3,000 known and suspected cases of forced marriage in the past two years, alone, and Tahirih Executive Director Layli Miller-Muro recently told Newsweek, “We’ve already learned enough in the survey to tell us we’re just hitting the tip of the iceberg.”  In many of these cases, death threats were among the arsenal of tactics used by families to coerce

Human Rights First celebrated World Refugee Day 2011 by paying homage to their law firm partners for outstanding pro bono legal service on behalf of indigent refugees.  Refugees are persons who are unable or unwilling to return to their native countries due to a well-founded fear of persecution or because their lives or freedom would be threatened.  The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that, by the end of last year, nearly 44 million people had been forcibly displaced worldwide, 15.4 million of them refugees. Many displaced men, women, and children spend years living in crowded camps, others languish in detention

According to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, last year nearly 2,000 children were internationally abducted to or from the United States by one of their own parents, in violation of the other parent’s rights: That’s 40 children taken from their homes and from their loved ones each week. Abductions traumatize children, their parents, friends, and family. International Parental Child Abduction is a painful scourge for so many, and it is something that deeply concerns me. Parental kidnapping compromises and destroys parent-child relationships, uproots and destabilizes children, and typically causes acute emotional distress to everybody involved.  Today’s International Missing Children’s Day strikes us as an auspicious occasion