ISLAMABAD, July 24: The Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) has urged the government to ratify the ‘Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child’ on preventing involving children in armed conflicts, according to a SPARC news release issued in Islamabad on Tuesday.
It said that two recent incidents –May 12 carnage in Karachi and Lal Masjid in Islamabad– were a proof that children were being recruited by organizations for armed conflicts that train and prepare them for military action and conflicts. The intensive coverage of the May 12 carnage in Karachi showed that youth and children, as young as 15 years old, were given arms and used as a shield for political conflict. The Lal Masjid incident has highlighted the continuing use of children by madressas. In February 2000, Pakistan’s interior minister had claimed that only “one per cent” of madressas in Pakistan sent their students for military training in Afghanistan.
Though there are no reliable statistics on the subject, the UN committee on the rights of the child in October 2003 urged Pakistan to take effective measures to ensure that children below the age of 18 years were not involved in hostilities.
It recommended that the government develop a comprehensive system for the reintegration and recovery of children who have participated in hostilities, in collaboration with non- governmental and international organizations.
Pakistan is among those few countries which despite being signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and signing the protocol in September 2001, has still not ratified the protocol. India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Bangladesh have ratified the protocol.
Article 38 of the Convention specifies 15 years as the minimum age for recruitment into a state’s armed forces and calls on the states to, “take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of 15 years do not take a direct part in hostilities.” ‘The Optional Protocol to the CRC about Children in Armed Conflict’ was declared in 2001. It did not compulsorily raise this age of 15 as the minimum recruitment age for a state’s armed forces. It, however, did declare the minimum age of recruitment into “armed groups” as 18.
SPARC demands from the government of Pakistan to ratify the Optional Protocol immediately, without reservations and take effective steps to criminalize underage recruitment by non-state actors and prosecute those found responsible.
Source: Dawn
Date:7/25/2007
