Child Custody – Single parents demand more time for meeting children

LAHORE – Once again parents supported by members of the civil society demonstrated outside the Punjab Assembly demanding a longer duration of the parent-children meeting. These parents have been divorced or separated from their spouses and currently do not have custody of children, either due to being under trial or because of the court’s conviction. It’s a violation of basic human rights that parents without custody are allowed a mere two hours of meeting with their children inside the precincts of court, while being separated for the rest of the year. They complain that their former spouses do not allow them to otherwise meet their children in a relaxed and causal manner and that the judiciary has done nothing about it.
Separation and divorce is not a pleasant predicament to begin with, say the parents, and we need to understand that it is most often an irreparable complexity of issues between couples that upon no viable alternative leads to dissolution of a marriage.
The protest was led by an organization called “My Foundation for Separated Children & Families, which struggles for the rights of non-custodial parents and their children, and is spearheaded by parents, children, lawyers and people from all walks of life. The sole intent of the organization is to assist the Guardian Courts in bringing positive reforms for the benefit of children & for the benefit of both custodial & non-custodial parents.
Tariq Nawaz, the organisation’s founder,” said, “We are attempting to create public awareness regarding the inhuman process of handing over the children to one parent, when divorced or separated parents approach our legal system invoking their right towards their children, and the other parents is denied.” He said that all contact between a parent and a child has been reduced to two hours in a month, which is exactly opposite to the core of a family system. Not only a parent but the love and affection a child is to share with their paternal or maternal family is denied to them.
He said that the custody holder mother or father is not even willing to let the child meet with their non-custodial parent let alone the family of non-custodial parent. “What adds fuel to the fire is that the attitude of the Guardian Courts towards this issue is very docile,” he adds. “We just want the provisions of law to be implemented where both the parents get the right of being with their child. There is no such condition in the law that limits the meeting of a child and parents to just two hours in a month.”