The international day against child labour was marked across the globe and in Pakistan on Tuesday as hundreds of thousands children work to help their families survive.
Seminars and conferences were held in different cities where speakers stressed on the need to end child labour and making them useful citizens for the future of the country.
Every year on June 12, the World Day against Children Labour is observed to create awareness about the rights of children and against the social evil of child labour. This year the theme of the day was ‘Human Rights and Social Justice-Let’s End Child Labour’ as set by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). It should be mentioned that several national and international organisations are working towards the accomplishment of the cause but no positive change has come to alter the fate of the child labourers and their number is increasing with each passing day.
The groups working for children’s rights underscored the need to take up urgent corrective steps to immediately ban child labour, especially domestic child labour, through the enforcement of the Employment of Children Act 2011.
The ILO launched the day in 2002 to highlight the miseries of working children all over the world. This year, the organisation has repeated its call for action to tackle this problem. The labour rights organisation defines child labour as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to their physical and mental development.
It refers to work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children, and interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school and obliging them to leave school prematurely.
According to the ILO, the most extreme forms of child labour involves child slavery, separation from their families, exposure to serious health hazards and illnesses. Pakistan is not among the countries where substantial efforts have been made to eliminate child labour, according to the organisations working for child rights. On the contrary, the country stands in the first row of those states where child labour is on the rise.
