The Senate on Wednesday passed the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Bill, 2019, paving the way for the child protection legislation to become a law more than two years after the body of nine-year-old Zainab Ansari, a rape-murder victim, was found in Kasur in 2018.
The gory incident had sparked outrage in the country and raised questions over the security of children and responsibilities on the part of the authorities concerned to prevent increasing incidents of child abuse in Pakistan.
The bill was presented for approval in the upper house by Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Azam Swati and was passed despite objections to some of its provisions by opposition lawmakers.
The bill, which will have jurisdiction across the country after becoming a law, was already passed by the National Assembly in January this year.
As per the draft then presented in the NA, the maximum punishment under the bill for child abuse and killing is life imprisonment with a fine of Rs1 million, as the proposal of death penalty was rejected by an NA committee. The minimum sentence will be 10 years.
A helpline will be set up to report missing children while the government will establish the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Agency (ZARRA) to issue an alert for a missing child. This agency will be led by a director general who will be appointed by the prime minister after public advertisement, according to a copy of the bill seen by Dawn.com.
ZARRA will coordinate with all relevant federal and provincial authorities and law enforcement agencies, and maintain an online database of all children reported missing or abducted with their current status.
Police will inform ZARRA about an incident of a child missing or abducted within two hours of receiving such a report and if the agency directly receives information of a child going missing or having been abducted, it will inform the relevant police station immediately.
PPP Senator Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar, who heads the Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights, informed the house that the committee had held 7-8 meetings to discuss the Zainab Alert bill and made some amendments to it.
He said under existing laws, police often refuse to register a First Information Report when a child is reported missing by his or her parents. This leads to the wastage of crucial initial time after the child’s disappearance.
But under the bill’s provisions, police will be bound to register an FIR within two hours of a child being reported missing by their parents. Police officials failing to comply with this provision will be punished with imprisonment of up to two years and a fine of Rs100,000.
According to the bill, which Khokhar said now covers all crimes against children, special courts will be bound to decide child sexual abuse cases within three months.
He said the committee was ready to incorporate further changes based on proposals by lawmakers to improve the bill.
Zainab was abducted, raped and murdered in 2018 and her body was found in a garbage dump in Kasur on January 9. It was the twelfth such incident to occur within a 10-kilometre radius in the city over a 12-month period.
Later, serial rapist Imran Ali, who had killed Zainab, was arrested and hanged till death in October 2018.
FM Qureshi briefs Senate on Afghan peace deal
Also on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi briefed the Senate on the Afghan peace deal recently signed in Doha, saying: “Pakistan was never a part of the deal. Our role has always been and will always be that of a facilitator.”
The foreign minister maintained that Pakistan cannot take all the responsibility for peace in Afghanistan. “This is a shared responsibility, and all [stakeholders] will have to play their part. It is inappropriate to place all the responsibility on Pakistan.”
“There are many powers, interests and motives [involved],” Qureshi said, adding that the true test of the Afghan leadership begins now. “Can they rise to the occasion and chart a peaceful way forward or not; only time will tell.”
