Fight for your right: As human rights violations go up, budgetary allocations go down

This is the second consecutive year that the budget has been reduced.

KARACHI:

The situation of human rights violations must be improving in the province since the government has continued the trend of cutting down the budgetary allocations for the human rights department.

Human rights campaigners will disagree, but the fact remains that the 2014-2015 fiscal budget announced on Friday shows that human rights’ allocation has been slashed for the second year running.

In the budget of the new fiscal year, the allocations for the human rights department are Rs36 million, as compared to last year’s Rs50 million, with both figures being dwarfed by the Rs137 million budget that the department boasted two years ago. The department had a budgetary deficit of just over Rs6.3 million as a total of Rs56.33 million was spent.

Nothing new

The government, which is constitutionally bound to ensure protection of the fundamental rights of every citizen, has failed to propose any new schemes under the Annual Development Programme.



The only good news is that they have not abandoned the three schemes which were approved in February 2011. In the current budget, the same have been continued. One of the schemes aims at establishing a human rights complaint cells in the provincial capital, which is plagued by ethnic, criminal and sectarian violence.

The other two ongoing schemes are for the establishment of free legal aid centres at the district level and for a series of awareness campaigns on human rights.

The rights campaigners believe that the government should have introduced at least one new scheme to sensitise the masses on their basic fundamental rights “not on its own but in compliance of the Sindh High Court’s (SHC) judgment.” Last November, the SHC had ordered the provincial and federal authorities to include human rights as a subject in the public school syllabus.

“When you look at Sindh, you will notice that there has been a rise in intolerance, attacks on the places of worship as well as rise in sectarian killings in Karachi,” said Zohra Yusuf, the chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “It is really important to introduce the human rights as a subject in schools to promote tolerance and respect for other communities.”

Published in The Express Tribune, June 15^th, 2014.