Daijiworld Media Network – Mangalore  

Mangalore, Apr 15: The 'Campaign Against Child Labour – Karnataka' (CACL-K) made an ardent appeal for inclusion of children's rights in the manifestos by political parties contesting the assembly elections, stated a press release issued here on Monday, April 14.  

Reni D’Souza, convener of CACL-K in the press release criticizing political parties lamented that they were ignoring children’s issues and therefore made a plea to at least address some of the issues concerning children in their election manifestos.    

Elaborating on the same and quoting the UN Convention on Rights of the Child 1989, D'Souza pointed out, 'Children form almost half of the state's population. A child is defined as a person below 18 years. India is a signatory to this Convention in 1992. According to the spirit of this Convention, children are citizens of not only tomorrow but also today,' he added.  

Hence, D'Souza said that this fact by itself and by sheer dint of numbers, calls for children's rights and aspirations to be considered of significance by political parties. Moreover, he opined that children may not have direct voting rights nor any direct say in the election process. However, they did have direct influence on their parents who exercised their (children’s) ;right to express' via votes.

This fact must be borne in mind by political parties and their candidates in elections and accordingly put the demands of these 'citizens' before the electorate and announce their strategy on how they intend to deal with children’s issues, D’Souza added in the release.  

In a recent meet, various child rights organizations had met and carried out consultations with children, child rights activists and researchers, after which they had prepared a charter for the political parties in which they had made several recommendations.

Some of these were protecting children from being used for nefarious activities and trafficking, as also demand for protection of children's rights, health and survival rights, education and development rights, general issues that influence children’s lives etc.  

In this context D'Souza in the press release informed 'They conducted field studies and analysed statistics. They assessed the performance of legislators in the Assembly between 2004 and 2007 with respect to children and upholding child rights,' he said.