Protecting our children — II

The government has not demonstrated any commitment towards incorporating the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In its recommendations, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has said that the state party should give priority attention to increasing budget allocations for children, ensuring a judicious distribution of resources between different fields and paying particular attention to enhancing budgetary allocations for social activities. It was further recommended that, “the State party ensure that primary education is free and compulsory for all children”. The recommendation is related both to legislation and resource allocation. Progress in Pakistan has been dismal as the percentage of GDP spending on education continued to decline for the past many years. There was a welcome step by parliament this year where education has been made a fundamental right for all children between five and 16 years of age through the Eighteenth Amendment. However, legislation without resource allocation for implementation is an ‘empty gesture’. Budgeting of laws is something completely unknown to policymakers in Pakistan, resulting in enactment of laws without any implementation mechanisms.

Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson has rightly pointed out that “while some states have made progress, others have made no more than symbolic gestures without creating an effective infrastructure of implementation and monitoring reaching down to the local level”. In Pakistan, the National Commission for Child Welfare and Development (NCCWD) is responsible for coordinating the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. NCCWD, established through an executive order, therefore, has no legal standing, has very limited human and financial resources on its disposal and is mostly dependent on donor funding. Being a non-statutory body, its recommendations are also not considered seriously by various ministries and provincial government departments, resulting in poor implementation of the Convention.

Sensitisation of professional groups about the Convention is one of the most important aspects regarding the implementation of the Convention which is missing in Pakistan. The Committee recommended that the state party (a) continue and strengthen its training and sensitisation on children’s rights for professional groups working with and for children and (b) develop adequately resourced policies and programmes for a systematic and sustained training process. NGOs have projects targeted at training different professional groups, mostly police and prison officials, in small numbers. However, no commitment has been demonstrated by the government in the past almost two decades to incorporate the Convention into the training curricula of professional groups. Training academies for the judiciary, teachers, police and health professionals should incorporate the Convention into their training curricula and materials.

Summarising what can be drawn from the above discussion, the government of Pakistan was not able to bring the national legislation into conformity with the Convention. Therefore, priority should be given to legislation at the federal level, i.e. enactment of pending bills; increased budgetary allocations particularly for education, health and child protection and statutory status for the NCCWD with more financial and human resources.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th, 2010.