Human Rights Day: ‘Torture number one crime against women, children’

Madadgar project coordinator expresses dissatisfaction with efforts made by govt to defend human rights.

KARACHI: Torture, particularly by the police, remains one of the most rampant crimes in Pakistan, revealed a Madadgar Helpline Trust report compiled on human-rights violation cases over the last 10 years.

At a seminar held on the eve of Human Rights Day on Thursday, Zia Awan, the Madadgar project coordinator and president of Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid (LHRLA), expressed his dissatisfaction with the efforts made by the Pakistan government to defend human rights.

The government keeps on signing international covenants but is not paying any attention to their implementation, he said.

Awan alleged that the main cause of human-rights violation in this government’s tenure is food inflation as this heightens the crime rate. Murder, suicide, target killings, child abuse and conventional practices continue to taint our society, revealed the report.

From January to November this year, 665 women committed suicide, a staggering 1,672 were murdered and 441 women suffered from police torture. In the same period, 392 men become were targeted and killed, 340 were tortured by the police and 501 committed suicide.

Horrifying figures show that during the first 11 months of the current year, 728 children were murdered, 417 were tortured and 183 children committed suicide.

Awan stressed the need to speak about human rights, both at an individual and a collective level because a developing country like Pakistan needs to take a lot of measures towards mitigating human-rights violations.

He said that all discriminatory laws should be repealed and that the bureaucracy, police, judiciary, parliamentarians and the media must be sensitised to human rights. The best way to curb these abuses is to divert more budgetary allocations towards the social sector, especially education, healthcare and women’s empowerment, according to Awan.

Design: Samad Siddiqui

Published in The Express Tribune, December 10^th, 2010.