KARACHI, Feb 6: Speakers at a workshop criticised the Sindh Home Department for its failure in setting up a juvenile court in the province under the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance promulgated eight years ago.
They said that children were still handcuffed and transported along with adult offenders, which was against the law.
They were speaking at the conclusion of a three-day workshop on Monday. The workshop aimed at training 34 lawyers under the British Pakistan Law Council (BPLC) Project Advocate. Under the project being executed in Lahore and Karachi, hundred lawyers have been trained to provide free legal representation to children in detention.
The participants maintained that the home department had funds to procure vehicles for transportation of offenders, but whenever the issue of juvenile court was raised, it always gave the excuse of financial constraints. The court could easily be established in the premises of the juvenile prison and the issue of taking the offenders to court would be solved for good, they said.
It was also pointed out that there was a dire need to create awareness amongst police officials about child rights as there were provisions in the law which allowed SHOs to release children on surety.
On the occasion, Deputy Secretary Prison Zulfiqar Sherwani failed to satisfy the audience on these issues. He maintained that over-crowding of prisons, financial constraints, old jail manual and acute shortage of parole staff (there are only three parole officers in Sindh) were some of the reasons for the poor performance in jails.
The workshop was told that there were 12,000 to 14,000 street children in Karachi, of them 41 per cent had been detained once or twice in their lifetime. However, figures obtained from police stations showed that only 30 FIRs were registered every month against children below the age of 18.
Expressing concern over the state of children in detention, BPLC project leader Mehnaz Malik said that the process of rehabilitation of a child should ideally start during custody. Thirty to forty per cent children, who were visited in jails and police stations in the last four months during the course of the project, were found to have self-inflicted injuries. This reinforced the need for some sort of psychotherapy during detention, she said.
So far, under the Project Advocate, 186 cases had been taken up in Karachi and Lahore and release of 76 children has been secured of them, seven were released in Karachi with the help of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) and the rest in Lahore. The three-year project launched last year is managed by the Law Society of England and Wales in partnership with the BPLC.
