PESHAWAR, March 13: An international meeting organised by Defence for Children International (DCI), The Netherlands in Amsterdam, has proposed establishment of an office of ombudsman for Children in Prisons.

According to a press release issued here on Wednesday by the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), the DCI had organised an experts’ meeting on “Children in Prison” few days back, which was attended by 25 experts from different countries.

SPARC’s Arshad Mahmood presented Pakistan’s report on “Juvenile Justice in Pakistan”. He endorsed the idea of a global campaign and suggested that a campaign on the pattern of Global March against child labour should be started.

Most of the presentations depicted that the laws in different countries did not make a difference between criminal and anti-social behaviour. It was agreed that depriving a child of his/her liberty should be the last resort, and that too for the shortest possible time.

Different non-custodial measures should be identified according to local and regional circumstances to minimise the chances of child imprisonment. It was felt during the discussion that juvenile justice was not a priority area of the UN agencies.

Senior Child protection officer from Unicef, Geert Cappelaere said that Unicef was trying to put juvenile justice as a priority on its agenda. However, he said that Unicef was not going to support building of children’s prisons as they were interested in improving social protection and building prisons was like supporting depriving children of their liberty.

He said there were one million children in prisons around the world. The forthcoming UN special session on children was going to hammer out a special agreement about juvenile justice.

A professor of criminology from Canada, Professor Irvin Waller, said the number of children in prisons in the US was much higher than in Pakistan. He said the population of US was 276.5 million and the number of juvenile prisoners was 90,000, which was very high.