A child washing a car in Lahore. The Lahore court has ordered Punjab government to ban children working as domestic help. Image Credit: Online

ISLAMABAD: While welcoming the Lahore High Court’s directions to the Punjab government on Thursday to ban employment of children under 15 as domestic servants, child rights activists have called for raising the age limit of the ban to 18.

The LHC while hearing a petition seeking ban on child domestic labour has directed the Punjab government to legislate rules regulating and monitoring domestic service and ensure children below the age of 15 are not taken on as domestic servants.

Lahore-based advocate Zaka Sheraz in March this year had moved a petition requesting the court to censure the then provincial government of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) for failure to protect the rights of young domestic servants.

On Thursday, Justice Jawad Hassan of the LHC stated that since the establishment of Pakistan, child domestic workers were being subject to torture, inhuman treatment and were being exploited.

A counsel representing the Punjab government produced before the court a draft bill of the domestic workers rights 2018 and informed the court the provincial government had constituted committees to ensure none of the domestic servants were made to work for more than eight hours a day.

Valerie Khan, a French-Pakistan activist working for women/children’s rights and Chairperson of Acid Rights Victims, while talking to Gulf News said lawmakers and courts must understand that child domestic labour (CDL) was a form of modern slavery which is forbidden under the Constitution of Pakistan and said rights of domestic workers as a whole needed to be upheld. “We need to regulate adult domestic labour and ban child labour under 18.”

Khan, who has been living and working in Islamabad for the last 22 years with her work mainly focusing on rights and rehabilitation of socially, physically and criminally-abused women and children, is of the view that the decision implied it was justified to torture servants above certain years of age.

She also refuted charges by some that laying off hundreds and thousands of child workers would in a way deprive them of their daily bread and they would no longer be able to earn for their families. She said people need to understand that employing children as domestic workers was a form of child labour and secondly their parents or elders should be taken in by the employer and they (domestic servants above the age limit) should be paid well so that they could further feed and clothe their children and families.

The measure taken by the Punjab government is merely a cosmetic measure and labour inspectors are not competent enough to raid or monitor the problem of child labour effectively in Pakistan, she said.

Executive Director of “Search for Justice” Iftikhar Mubarak is of the view that it was the primary responsibility of the state to ensure best interests of children in accordance with the guidelines of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child while initiating such legislative interventions.