KARACHI, Dec 26: Speakers at a conference on child’s rights said that although children form nearly half of the country’s 140 million population they were not being given their due rights.

The two-day conference, organized jointly by UNICEF and Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid, was inaugurated on Wednesday.

The speakers said that although there are a few laws to protect the child’s rights, but they were not being implemented effectively. Pakistan is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and is bound to make all its laws in conformity with the convention, but very little has been done in this regard, they observed.

Many non-governmental organizations have been making efforts to create awareness about child rights, but as a majority of the NGOs have been working separately these could not generate much pressure.

They suggested that all such organizations and like-minded people should join hands and launch struggle on war-footings to put pressure on the government so that it took steps for improving children’s condition in the country.

Under the Sindh Children’s Act 1955, no child could be sent to a prison and is to be sent to a reformatory or a certified school, but many children have been lodged in various prisons in the province.

The idea behind the law was that if a child committed a crime, rather than punishing him, he should be properly trained, educated and groomed so that he grew up to become an active member of the society.

Punjab, the speakers pointed out, had also passed a Youthful Offenders’ Act in 1983, but that too has not yet been notified. Although the Juvenile Justice Ordinance was promulgated over a year back, it has not been implemented effectively.

The government, they said, has not yet specified the age of a child and different laws mentioned different ages up to which a person is considered as a child. Some laws termed 15 years, some 18 years while other say childhood ends when one attains puberty. The CRC considers a person as a child until the age of 18 years.

They said children have been kidnapped for use as beggars, sexually exploited, used to prepare pornographic materials, and trafficked within the country and even abroad. They said psychologists were of the view that there are chances that a child once abused would become an abuser later on.

The speakers gave data which showed that over 824 children had gone missing in the country between January and November 2001 — 314 in Sindh alone, followed by Punjab with 246, NWFP with 183, Balochistan with 75 and only one child missing in Azad Kashmir.

They said that over 428 children had been murdered between Jan and Nov this year. Over 144 minor girls were raped and 15 of them were later murdered; over 208 young boys were sodomized, 19 of them were killed later on.

Five groups — displaced children (trafficked, missing, street); special children (mentally and physically handicapped); protection services for children (shelter, legal, counselling and rehabilitation); child abuse (physical and sexual); children and youth in jail (juvenile delinquents and children with mothers) — were formed to give their recommendations on these subjects. The recommendations would be submitted on Thursday.

Justice Sabihuddin Ahmad of the Sindh High Court, Supreme Court’s former judge Nasir Aslam Zahid, Raana Syed of UNICEF, LHRLA’s Zia Awan, Jameela Qavi, Faryal Gauher, Afreen Farha Raheem, and others spoke on the occasion.