Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - Quetta—The Protection of the Child Rights (SPARC), Tuesday expressing concern over Employment of Children Act 1991 demanded that ambiguities, anomolies and contradictions in the said Act should be rectified. “The Employment of Children Act 1991 has various confusions as it simultaneously bans and regulates child labour.”
The National Manager of SPARC, Child Labour Unit, Gulnaz Zahid, in “Training on Tackling Child Labour through Effective Legislative, Implementation and Monitoring”, said the Act should clarify and define the issue of Child labour minutely to endorse the international standards. “If a law has no clarity to define an issue and people take interpretation of the law on their own then it is a confused law like that the Employment of Children Act 1991 that simultaneously bans and regulates child labour,” she said.
She disclosed that no single definition of child labour is given in this law. She emphasized the need to make differentiation between child work and child labour through law. Abdul Khaliq Dotani, Labour Officer, Government of Balochistan said that after passage of 18th Amendment, no single law exists in Balochistan at provincial level to check and stop child labour. He added that according to law experts, after passage of 18th Amendment, Employment of Children Act 1991 has lost its status and now it could not be taken as effective.
