There is only one detention centre for juveniles in Karachi, not two, as mentioned in law ministry's report in Senate
ISLAMABAD: This is with reference to a news item about juvenile justice in this paper. Some information provided by the law ministry in the Senate is factually incorrect. There is only one detention centre for juveniles in Karachi, not two, as mentioned in the report. However, there is a Remand Home established under the Sindh Children Act of 1955, which is run by the Probation and Reclamation Department, where children are kept for a short period, but this cannot be termed a detention centre. Similarly, not a single borstal institution has been established in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) and Balochistan, despite the fact that both provinces have legislation in place now — the K-P Borstal Institutions Act of 2012 and the Balochistan Borstal Institutions Act of 2014.
No borstal institution or detention centre for juveniles exist in Bannu, Peshawar and Haripur districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Budgetary allocations were made for building borstal institutions in these districts in the financial years 2002-03 and 2003-04, but the structures for these were not built in Peshawar and Haripur. A building was constructed for a borstal institution in front of the new Central Prison Building, Bannu, but it was never made operational. The K-P government should immediately operationalise the borstal institution in Bannu and establish borstal institutions in Peshawar and Haripur not only to keep juveniles from becoming hardened criminals and to focus on their rehabilitation and reintegration into society, but also to avoid child sexual abuse cases inside the prison as reported by the juvenile section or what is famously called the ‘munda khana’ of Central Prison, Peshawar.
Arshad Mahmood
Published in The Express Tribune, October 17th, 2015.
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