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WEEKLY
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| Govt report on child rights disputed |
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Thursday, February 12, 2009
by Ghulam Dastageer
PESHAWAR: Participants at a consultation here Wednesday discussed in detail ‘Alternative Report on State of Child Rights in Pakistan’, observing that no laws exclusively relating to the child rights exist in Balochistan, NWFP, federally and provincially administered tribal areas, Northern Areas and the Azad Jammu and Kashmir. They also raised certain objections to the report submitted by the government to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child (UNCRC).
Discussing the government’s report, Anees Jilani from the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (Sparc), said the government claimed having trained 750,000 teachers since year 2,000 appeared unrealistic, as the total number of teachers in the country was less than this number.
“Paragraphs 25 to 30 of the report talk about training programmes being organised by various non-governmental organisations. Almost all the NGOs in Pakistan are small and operate with limited resources and are thus hardly expected to cover a country of 163 million people,” he pointed out.
Anees said laws making education compulsory up to grade five had been introduced in all the provinces except Balochistan, NAs and the AJK. “However, no steps have been taken to enforce these laws, namely the Punjab Compulsory Primary Education Act, 1994; the NWFP Primary Education Act, 1996; the Sindh Compulsory Primary Education Ordinance, 2002; the Federally Administered Tribal Areas Compulsory Primary Education Regulation, 2002; and the West Pakistan Primary Education Ordinance,” he said.
The CSO official lamented that the bodies meant for enforcing these laws had not been formed despite passage of more than a decade in some cases and the rules had yet to be introduced. Anees said National Action Plan on Children, which was introduced in 2006, had yet to be approved by the federal cabinet, “which goes to show the level of interest and government commitment to the issue.”
The alternative report stated that the National Protection Monitoring and Data Collection System was yet to be introduced both at the federal and provincial levels. “After a lapse of 18 years, the country is still experimenting with the pilot projects.”
It is worth mentioning here that Pakistan ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child on November 12, 1990. “Ideally, national commission for child welfare and development or a separate unit within the Statistics Division should have been established to collect exclusive child-related data, and to monitor and evaluate progress achieved in the implementation of the Convention,” the alternative report suggested.
The document further stated that honour killing was a minor issue in Pakistan if compared in the context of around 500,000 under five-year infants dying each year due to malnourishment.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
