Submitted by jonas on
[16 April 2015] - SPARC launched its annual State of Pakistan’s Children Report in April 2014. Keeping up with its 17year old tradition, the report presents an annual overview of the developments in various sectors that affect children in Pakistan including Child Rights, Health, Education, Juvenile Justice, Violence against Children, and Child Labor. The Report presents a dismal state of child rights and child protection in Pakistan whereby successive governments have failed to take concrete measures that can bring about positive and sustainable changes in the lives of children in the country. This is because, even today, children are seen as indirect beneficiaries in most of the state sponsored development interventions that specifically target adults. In this regard, the governments focus on large scale development projects that are ‘visible’ and seen as a political party’s legacy by the voters in the upcoming elections. So, development projects that aim at bringing about improvement in the quality of education or uplift of juvenile detention centers are seen as peripheral interventions that do not ensure public mandates in the future.
The overall outcome of the above mentioned developments can be seen in the lack of progress in introducing and updating child rights and child protection legislation in the aftermath of the 18th Constitutional Amendment; the dismal state of health and education infrastructure, especially in rural areas; the persistence of a retributive juvenile justice system; employment of millions of children in the unmonitored informal sector; and increasing levels of tabooed or culturally sanctioned forms of violence against children in the country. These are sad developments considering that the year 2014 was marked as the 25th Anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC): Pakistan signed the CRC in 1990 thereby pledging its commitment to the protection and promotion of the rights of children in the country.
Read the full report.
Country: