Children’s Day: Experts urge govt to take kids seriously

Consultation discusses children’s issues, criticices official apathy over child legislation.

ISLAMABAD:

Universal Children’s Day will be celebrated globally today (Wednesday) to create awareness about child rights, but Pakistan has yet to find its feet over the issue.

There is no separate ministry or body to deal with children’s issues and no budget is allocated in for the welfare of children and promotion of their rights.

Considering the dire situation, the Child Rights Movement (CRM) Pakistan urged the country’s premier to establish a national commission on the rights of the child, allocate funds for promotion of child rights and enact long pending bills related to child rights. This was stated during a consultation at a local hotel in Islamabad on Tuesday.



CRM said on November 20, 1989, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Pakistan became party to UNCRC on November 12, 1990. 23 years after the ratification, there is little progress on UNCRC’s repeated recommendations.

Arshad Mehmood, senior manager of advocacy and campaigns with Save the Children, Pakistan, said the previous government had declared 2013 as the year of child rights but no concrete and visible measures were taken. He said there is a dearth of laws that could provide protection to children from violence, abuse and exploitation.

He said rules for the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2012 in ICT have not been notified yet and no budget has been allocated for its effective implementation.

He said there are schools but no students and in some areas there are one room schools but 300 children are enrolled, adding that Pakistan will not achieve the Millennium Development Goals as every year one-third of the country’s children die before reaching their fifth birthday.



Mehmood further said Pakistan’s fifth periodic report under the Convention on the Rights of the Children is due since December 2012 and the last report was submitted in 2009. The government should immediately submit it to the UN committee in Geneva as it has already been delayed too much, he said.

Manizeh, the head of Sahil, an NGO, said prevention of child abuse is the first thing our society and state has to intervene in. She said 2,041 cases of child abuse were reported from January to September this year, adding that 1,371 of them were girls.

While sharing findings of a recent research, she said there is a lack of a conducive environment in families for children to easily disclose abuses against them.

“Options should be open for children to share these things with their parents. Children seek support,” she said.

Valerie Khan of Group Development Pakistan said “The government should play its role by bringing new legislation, allocating resources and putting children as a top priority”.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 20^th, 2013.