This paper takes as its analytic frame the recent amendment of Egypt’s Child Law (2008), Code 126 (or Qanun Al Tifl Al Muaddad) in line with international children’s rights guidelines. Drawing on over 27 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cairo with lawyers, child rights activists and doctors within several transnational NGOs, I will show how an international model of the child is translated and reconstituted into what Sally Engle Merry calls “vernacular politics” through the daily bureaucratic practices of these experts. By tracing the decriminalization of street children and inclusion of the category “children at risk” (children as universally vulnerable) into the law, I will demonstrate how children’s rights, which center on the bodily integrity and autonomy of children, precipitate a new set of logics and ethical struggles over personhood, the family and the state among NGO workers in Cairo.