KARACHI: On this day each year, the UN marks World Children’s Day across the globe, signifying a special event that goes back to 1989, marking it as the “ Convention on the Rights of the Child”. Titled UNCRC- United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, this is a promise that binds all nations, countries, and communities to protect the children of the world. This convention further states that all children have the right to live, survive, and develop, and to be protected from abuse, exploitation, violence, and death.
Decades later, the world today has failed its children. As we watch our children die helplessly in the Middle East, nations and governments are mercilessly watching this game of death. In Pakistan today, we need to re-visit our oath to this convention by standing up for child rights.
Pakistan was one of the first countries to ensure UNCRC ratification in 2010 but has since failed to fully implement the legal framework design policy into law. Has Pakistan failed to protect the rights of its children?
According to Article 12 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, state parties shall ensure that all children stand capable of forming his or her views freely on matters that affect them and that the views of the child are given due importance as per age and maturity of the child.
The majority of the younger population has zero access to quality education, with one of the lowest primary school enrollment in the world. Instead many children are forced into child labor, to earn for their families instead of being sent to schools as compulsory state laws under the convention do not exist. Public sector schools are not being developed by the state to serve the majority of the child population while private education in schools is beyond the reach of the common man.
In a country plagued by poverty, our children are being deprived of access to basic education and are being brainwashed into going on the streets to beg for money. The state refuses to inject investment into education for the young.
As per our constitution under Article 25-A, it is the responsibility of the state of Pakistan to provide free and compulsory education to ‘all children aged between 5 and 16 years’. By law, this is a basic violation of our constitutional rights and the rights of the child under UNCRC. Furthermore, very few governments in the past have taken up this agenda seriously by taking drastic reforms to improve basic access to primary education within public schools.
There should be zero tolerance on this issue by the state and the government and strict punishment should be set under law, for those who have been responsible for crushing the education system in the country.
For starters, there needs to be a nationwide re-assessment of the education standards that currently apply to our public schools. Why is everyone opting for private schooling when the public is unable to afford it? In other nations, the public sends their children to public schools where the school fees are regulated by the state and law-breakers are punished under the law. In Pakistan, less than 3% is spent on education.
Then there is another deepening crisis in Pakistan. A lot of children are living in conflict zones within the country. Ninety percent of children living in rural Pakistan are not attending proper schools, as schools are slowly being destroyed. There are many ghost schools in the country, where teachers are only present on paper.
According to experts on education and literacy, there is a very high number of children today exposed to a negative violent society without any legal protection. Increased exposure to negative media and online content is a high risk followed by other social evils like extremism, youth crimes, beggary, child sexual abuse, and child recruitment in criminal activities.
One of the challenges today is the illegal trafficking of children which is increasing day by day leading to severe mental and physical trauma in early childhood for most children born to parents who are poor, unemployed, or uneducated. The search for food security, shelter, access to water rights, and access to safe and secure neighborhoods is a rising challenge today for most children.
Poverty and civil disorder are further escalating the misery, leading to increasing insecurity in children today, leading them to a negative path, in the absence of strict laws to regulate the education system. Moreover, the increased number of on-the-street children exposes them to extreme risk of child recruitment in war zones.
As per the UN Charter of Human Rights under Article 31 on children’s rights, all children have the right to live, learn, and be educated in a secure environment with access to basic rights such as clean drinking water in schools. Can the government check on how many listed schools provide clean drinking water access to children?
According to Human Rights Watch, the UN has refused to hold accountable the countries who are responsible for not making any efforts’ to protect the children living in conflict zones and sub-standard conditions, without healthcare and education. UN’s B-list of countries has a seriously flawed human rights history. Shockingly, the USA is one of the countries that have not implemented UNCRC, despite the UN being housed in the USA.
It is estimated that there are over 2.5 million bonded laborers in Pakistan and most of them are children, who travel from rural villages to big cities in countless numbers with zero access to education, illegally recruited in various menial jobs, or smuggled to be part of the street criminal gangs.
It is time for the Ministry of Interior and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to activate the state’s response to modern slavery by activating a robust national action plan through its anti-trafficking unit as they have the budget, capacity, and power to take on this massive mission to protect our children, with focus on child slavery inside Pakistan and transnational trafficking.
The Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) needs to be aligned with this task force to ensure an effective mechanism to win this battle to save our children from harm.
Pakistan has one the lowest conviction rates on crimes related to forced labor and is not in abidance to the BLSA (Bonded Labor System Abolition ) Act of 1992. The state has the responsibility to ensure that children are given the right cultural and social environment to protect the future generations of this highly populated nation where the majority of the youth population is looking for honest leaders as mentors and teachers.
Pakistan has a poor track record on ensuring children’s rights, whether it is children’s basic rights in schools or outside on the streets. Parents are misguided and do not analyze the root cause. Children who are ignored at home by parents or in school by teachers or the lack of teaching in schools, develop negative traits often leading to severe criminal behavior or anti-social lives, leading them into drugs and away from their families.
On this day, Pakistan must take action and improve ‘education‘ across the nation. The media must its part to produce child-friendly content while social media must enact strong monitoring and evaluation procedures through strict regulatory measures, to ban the use of negative imagery, text, and content that is harmful to a child and fulfill all obligations as per laws under UNCRC- Rights of the Child.
We are battling an inside war and we must unite to win this war against corruption and illiteracy by protecting the health and well-being of our children which in turn is the actual health of the nation.
About the Author:
S. Zeeshan A Shah is an environmentalist & and change maker, with over 25 years of expertise in banking, education, and the health sector. He is the Founder of CNNA- Children Nature Network Asia- an advocacy and training initiative to protect the rights of the child under UNCRC. He tweets on zeeshan82445998
