Justice for thejuvenile

Pakistan has never made the issue of juvenile justice a priority. There are only seven total juvenile detention facilities in the country, four of which are in Sindh, two in Punjab and one in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This means that most child prisoners are housed in the same facilities as adults – something which is in violation of our international treaty obligations as well as our own law. In Balochistan, where there is not a single juvenile justice facility, one provincial assembly member pointed out a couple of months back that 99 percent of child prisoners in the province face sexual harassment and abuse. Such stories are rife throughout the country. Often, children are punished for crimes committed by their parents or are locked up under the pretext of protective custody. Torture and abuse is common and the focus is on punishment rather than rehabilitation. The first step towards reform is needed at the legislative level. Right now, children as young as seven years old can be held criminally liable for their actions and sent to prison. The second reform needed is to hold the state responsible for ensuring the age of children who may end up being tried as adults. Since many children have not had birth certificates made, judges will often unilaterally decide how old they are and may rule them to be adults even without any proof.

There must also be an immediate halt to all executions of those who were convicted of crimes that were committed when they were minors. The Juvenile Justice System Ordinance 2000 as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does just that but in practice it has been decided that these laws do not cover anti-terrorism courts. Since such courts are now being used for a whole host of cases that have little to do with the commonly understood definition of terrorism, we have ended up with a situation where an estimated 10 percent of death row inmates are juvenile offenders. Once these laws have been reformed, the state needs to change how it thinks about juvenile justice. Detention centres should primarily exist to give these children an education and to give them the skills to readjust to the outside world upon their release. We need to stop thinking of justice as being primarily retributive and look on it as rehabilitative – especially when it comes to our children.