A couple of years ago news of blatant child abuse surfaced from Rawalpindi in an incident in which a seven-year-old domestic worker had been beaten to death by her so-called “employers’’. This was certainly not a stand-alone incident as children are routinely employed in jobs that are not suited to their age and where they are ill-treated. While most pieces of domestic legislation disallow children below the ages of 14 or 15 from being employed in any occupation, child labour continues to be rampant in many sectors. PILAP wrote an RTI to the National Commission on the Rights of the Child (NCRC) asking what measures have been taken to ensure that the legal definition of a child is brought in conformity with the definition outlined in the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (ICRC) to which Pakistan is a party, and other measures to ensure that children are treated in accordance with the Convention.
