Supreme Court to be moved for recovery of missing children

We will approach the Supreme Court of Pakistan within a few days and are going to file a public interest litigation under Article 184, Section 3, of the constitution to take cognisance of the situation of missing and kidnapped children and formulation of the process of their recovery.

This was disclosed to the media by noted Advocate and Human Rights activist Zia Awan at a press conference held at his office on Tuesday.   Awan, who is also the founder of the Madadgaar National Helpline, and National Child Commissioner, lamented that the state had failed the children of the nation by not providing them protection against kidnapping or trafficking.

He said that there was no coordination or assistance mechanism among provinces for rescuing or recovering these unfortunate children and then reuniting them with their families. Police, he said, took ages to locate them.

“We have decided to make 37 organisations respondents to the case among which are: Police, Nadra, provincial Inspectors General of Police, FIA, Pemra and the Inter-Provincial Coordination Council,” Awan stated.

Police, he said, were useless in the endeavour to locate missing children. At Karachi’s Clifton locality, he said that Madadgaar had stalls and parents came looking for their children. At the Quaid’s Mazaar, he said, 600 children had been lost.

He suggested that festival sites should have sound systems for the location of lost children. Awan added that according to the MNH’s statistics (gathered from police control), a total of 2,135 cases of missing children were reported in Karachi alone.

Nation-wide, he said, the helpline helped 2,251 parents reunite with their lost children. Explaining the modus operandi of the kidnappers, he said that children and sometimes even women, kidnapped from Sindh, are whisked off to Balochistan which was close by and then often to Afghanistan.

He said that according to police statistics, over 2,000 children were missing in Karachi. He provided the media folk with the data of missing, kidnapped, and trafficked children for the whole year (2016).

According to the data 115 children went missing, 472 were kidnapped, and 52 trafficked; the total coming to 639, just for 2016. He lamented the absence of shelter homes for children for their interim lodging while the formalities for reuniting them with their parents were on.

He said that according to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of The Child (UNCRC) - to which Pakistan was a signatory - according to Articles 11 (kidnapping) and 35 (abduction, sale, and trafficking), it was the sole responsibility of the government to take all measures, administrative, legislative, or operational to make sure that children were not kidnapped, abandoned, or trafficked.

“Yet”, he said, “The state has failed to protect our children as the number of missing, trafficked, and street children is on the rise.”

A certain Iftikhar Butt, whose 12 years old son, Shamsher Butt, went missing on April 15, was also at the press conference to narrate his tale of woe.  He said that his son said that he was just going for a spin on his motor bike and would be back soon but had not returned to date.

He said that after a long wait, he went over to the police to report the matter but thus far there was no help forthcoming. He showed photographs of his son and seemed to be pretty distraught.