Ineffective enforcement blamed on weak mechanism, lack of resources

Although the Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act 2013 is a piece of landmark legislation to end early marriages in the province, it is poorly implemented. Besides, a lack of proper structures and sensitisation, poor resources and a lack of serious efforts have been the contributing factors behind the poor progress in enforcing the law at grassroots level.

Civil society activists and lawyers made these observations at a provincial dialogue held on Thursday for an extensive review of the act. They highlighted pros and cons of the law and said that addressing the problems could leave a huge positive impact on the society at large.

The Sindh Community Foundation, in collaboration with the United Nations Trust Fund to end violence against women–UN Women, organised the dialogue, which was attended by a number of civil society representatives, lawyers, media persons and community activists from across the province.

Karamat Ali of the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education Research, prominent researcher on human rights Iqbal Detho, social activist Zulfqar Halepoto, lawyer Tahir Malik of Legal Aid Forum, Javed Soz from the SCF, senior journalist Mahesh Kumar and Shahnaz Sheedi of the South Asia Partnership-Pakistan were among the key speakers.

Identifying the gaps in the law, speakers said the rule of business of the act had been formulated and duly put in place, yet the implementation of the law was still awaited. The government’s mechanism to implement the law was weak, making it hard to deal with cases relating to early marriages, they said, emphasising the need to strengthen the implementation mechanism as highlighted in the recommendations of the review.

According to the Sindh Police data, only 51 cases have been registered under this law across the province so far. Police officials are not much aware about the laws in other areas/districts except the three-targeted districts where the SCF and few NGOs have intervened.

Speakers said there was need to continuously support the required infrastructure to make such laws further effective. They said child protection units played a basic role in implementing the law, but in many districts they were missing and in the districts where they had been established they had poor resources and a weaker role in implementing the law; and, that needed more resources and greater attention to be effective.

Speakers emphasised that the district monitoring committees had been notified under the law, but they had attracted a feeble response and remained ineffective to put that law in practice at the local level.