Resolve made to help curb child marriages

MANSEHRA: A three-day media fellowship attended by journalists from across Pakistan, Azad Jammu Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan came to an end on Sunday with the pledge to help curb child marriages in the country.

The National Commission on the Status of Women in collaboration with UNICEF and UNFPA has organised a three-day media fellowship to sensitise as many as 45 male and female journalists selected from KP, Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, AJK and GB at federal capital Islamabad.

The chairman of the National Commission on the Status of Women, Nilofar Bakhtiar told the participants that her commission recently launched a second National Media Fellowship and now also organised a refresher for journalists who attended a series of events in the first such fellowship in the country in 2001 and 2022.

“We understand such fellowships are highly effective to sensitise journalists on gender-based violence, and child marriages,” she said.

Nilofar Bakhtiar said her commission was working to get minority family laws amended to repeal such sections that negate the basic human rights of women and children. She said for the first time, family laws were promulgated in 1859 in the subcontinent and couldn’t be amended or repealed the sections challenging human rights even after Pakistan came into existence in 1947.

The commission said that until the federal and provincial governments would not prioritize human, particularly women and children rights, the issues faced by people in the country their commissions couldn’t effectively deliver its mandate.

She said three provincial commissions in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh had been without chairpersons for the last several years. “You (journalists) should adopt journalistic norms and morality while writing on women and children issues as we want to end gender-based violence in the country,” she said.