Government urged to protect flood-affected children

Speakers urged govt to prevent flood-affected children from resorting to physical labour to support their families.


Ppi November 25, 2010

SIALKOT: Speakers at a seminar held on Wednesday urged the government to take measures to prevent the flood-affected children from resorting to physical labour to support their families.

The seminar was organised at a local hotel by Sialkot chapter of Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC).

The speakers said that the society is also equally responsible for putting an end to child abuse at workplaces. They said that there was a dire need to make collective efforts to eradicate child labour. The criticised the government for not taking any concrete steps to implement the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

The speakers held that domestic child servants had to suffer a lot of abuse at the hands of their employers, adding that six child servants had so far been murdered in the province since the case of Shazia Masih got reported in the media in January 2010.  These, they said, were the number of reported cases, adding that many more could have occurred which might not have got media attention.

The speakers praised the adoption of a Child Protection Bill by the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa assembly and urged upon other provincial governments to introduce similar legislations. Muhammad Arsalan Khan, the SPRAC child rights committee district coordinator, said that more than 6 million children got affected by the floods of which about 2.7 million were in need of immediate assistance. He urged the government to commit to take effective steps for improving the state of child rights.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 25th, 2010.

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