On child rights: ‘Pakistan lacks comprehensive legal framework’

SPARC calls for implementation of UN Convention on Rights of the Child.

LAHORE:

Pakistan has yet to develop a comprehensive legal framework on child protection issues like trafficking, sexual abuse and domestic labour, though it is required to do so under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, according to an NGO representative.

Pakistan has signed and ratified the convention, under which it is meant to protect certain rights if children, but the situation on the ground is different, said Iqbal Detho, national manager of the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), in a briefing on Wednesday.

Detho said that around 1.2 million children are trafficked each year out of which 43 per cent are forced into prostitution. The trafficking of children for forced labour and prostitution is a contemporary form of slavery, he said. He said that the latest estimates put the total number of prostituted children as high as 10 million around the world.

He said these alarming numbers had prompted the UN to introduce an optional protocol to the convention criminalising the sale and trafficking of children. Pakistan signed the convention on September 26, 2001, but didn’t ratify it until July 2, 2011.

He said that human rights groups such as the Coalition to Stop Child Soldiers had estimated that there were around 300,000 children engaged in armed conflicts around the world. Many were forcibly recruited or abducted to join armies, some of them when under the age of 10. The UN introduced an optional protocol to the convention to seek to stop the use of children as soldiers on May 25, 2000, and Pakistan signed it on September 26, 2001, but has yet to ratify it. The protocol has been ratified by 147 countries.

Detho said that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child had lacked a communications procedure that would enable children to submit complaints and seek redress for human rights violations they had experienced. He said a protocol in this regard was tabled on December 19, 2011, but Pakistan was yet to sign or ratify it. Twenty-six countries have so far signed it while none have ratified it.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 19^th, 2012.