CHRI commemorates human rights day
The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) in collaboration with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on Tuesday held a community durbar on child labour to commemorate International Human Rights Day at Bortianor, near Accra.
The durbar aimed at increasing awareness among chiefs, community leaders, children, families on the negative consequences of child labour.
Ms Mina Mensah, CHRI Africa Regional Coordinator said the Children’s Act (560) of 1998 enumerates some of the rights of a child, adding among these were the rights to education and well-being, protection from torture and degrading treatment and protection from exploitative labour.
She said many children were deprived of these basic rights, resulting in many of them being deprived of a proper childhood upbringing.
She noted that CHRI believed that the International Human Rights Day was an ideal time to increase awareness on child labour by focusing on the plights of children engaged in stone quarrying and fishing, in the Weija Municipality by holding a durbar with the chiefs and people of the Bortianor community.
The CHRI Africa Regional Coordinator said the durbar was to re-emphasise the negative impact of the phenomenon on the development of children, “examples from several countries has shown that focusing on grassroots strategies to mobilize communities against child labour has proven crucial to breaking the cycle of child labour in many communities”.
Ms Mensah explained that the child, by reason of his or her physical and mental state needed special safeguards and care, “Ghana as a country had failed to adequately address this menace, especially along the stone quarrying, fishing and cocoa production areas”.
She said several policies had been formulated and legislation passed to confront challenges children faced in Ghana, adding, notable among them was the National Plan of Action on child labour and the Livelihood Empowerment against Poverty Programme for households with children involved in child labour.
“The implementations of these initiatives however continue to be plagued with bottlenecks such as overlapping mandates and weak coordination among various stakeholders, weak enforcement of legal provisions, inadequate budgets and weak institutional capacity for monitoring and evaluation among others”.
Ms Mensah called on government to make available adequate funds for the enforcement of child labour laws and to ensure that these funds were used for the purposes for which they had been given.
She urged the parents to send their children to school so that they could become good leaders in future.
Mr Prosper Oye, Director of Department of Social Welfare at Weija Municipality said people who were in authority got the opportunity to go to school before they became prominent people in the country, so parents should also give their children the same opportunity.
Source: GNA