ISLAMABAD, June 28: In Pakistan around 600,000 children under the age of five die annually.

This was stated by Anees Jillani, Director of Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (Sparc), an NGO and a human rights activist while quoting Unicef’s latest report at the inaugural session of three-day national conference on Child Rights, organized by the ministry of women development here on Friday.

Besides only 50 per cent of our children reach the fifth grade and 25 per cent are under-weight due to malnutrition.

Although, Pakistan had signed convention on the rights of the child back in 1990 but a lot remains to be done for children’s welfare.

“All our energies are spent in trying to impress on the world community that Pakistani children are availing the best possible opportunities and all our obligations under the international conventions relating to children fully complied with”, he criticized.

Policy makers have each time responded to the international pressures rather than addressing its own problems. Strangely enough, we discovered the existence of child trafficking in Pakistan only when the US congress passed a law pressing the countries to fight against human trafficking. He disclosed that Balochistan and the NWFP did not have laws covering child rights, since independence. Sindh had laws since 1955 but it took the authorities 19 years to issue notification regarding its enforcement. In case of Punjab, enforcement of children’s ordinance 1983 was yet to be notified.

Children from different local schools staged skits on the problems faced by them and earned a good round of applause from the participants.