PUBLISHED
November 30, 2025
This year on Universal Children’s Day, as Pakistan prepares for its 2025 review by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, I’m forced to reflect on a 35-year-old promise.
In 1990, Pakistan was one of the six initiators of the World Summit for Children, a champion for the new UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). We ratified it with a speed that signalled leadership and moral clarity.
Thirty-five years later, that promise is a ghost. It haunts the 26 million Pakistani children who are out of school. It haunts the corridors of our prisons, where hundreds of juveniles are still treated like adult criminals. And it led our own prime minister, in 2024, to declare a national “education emergency”, a stark admission of systemic failure.
For the past several months, I set out to answer a simple question: What is the gap between what Pakistan reports to the world, and what it implements for its own children?
I did not conduct a single interview with a government official. I did not visit a single school or detention center. I didn’t need to. My investigation relied exclusively on the government’s own public documents, official budget execution reports, High Court judgments, and independent legal analyses.
What I found is a story not of malice, but of paralysis. It is the story of a state that excels at the bureaucracy of reporting but fails at the administration of implementation. We are a nation of modern, world-class laws that exist only on paper.
The paper trail
When I began my investigation, I started with the official story. I dug into the UN Treaty Body Database to find what we tell the world. The process is a formal, diplomatic dance. Pakistan submits a “State Party Report” to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva. The Committee, a body of experts, reads it, asks questions, and then issues a report card called “Concluding Observations”.
Our latest combined sixth and seventh State Party Report (CRC/C/PAK/6-7) is a perfect example of this. It’s a document of legislative progress. It proudly highlights the “various necessary measures” we’ve taken. The star exhibits are our modern laws: the establishment of the National Commission on the Rights of Child (NCRC) under the 2017 Act and the passage of the Juvenile Justice System Act (JJSA) of 2018.
On paper, this is compliance. The NCRC is a statutory watchdog. The JJSA is a modern framework that, on paper, abolishes the brutal, colonial-era treatment of children in the criminal justice system. It mandates “diversion” (keeping kids out of court), separate “observation homes,” and “Juvenile Justice Committees” in every district to manage these cases.
This is the story we tell Geneva. This is the promise.
My investigation was a simple, painstaking audit of that promise. I took these laws, which form the spine of our official reports, and used public data to see if they are real. I found they are not.
Juvenile justice
I started with the JJSA, our 2018 law. It’s a good law. It’s praised. But is it being implemented?
I found my first piece of crushing evidence in a 2023 legal analysis by the Research Society of International Law (RSIL). Their report, “A Practical Overview of Legal Assistance, Determination of Age, and Disposal Through Diversion,” is a quiet bombshell. It confirms the law is, in practice, a dead letter.
The RSIL analysis found that the “practical aspect” of the law’s core mechanism, diversion, is “very grim”. Why? Because the “Juvenile Justice Committees” mandated under Section 10 of the Act have not been properly established or notified. When RSIL researchers interviewed prosecutors and investigators, the very people who are supposed to use these committees, they found most were “unaware of the constitution of the Juvenile Justice Committees”.
Think about that. The state passes a landmark law, reports it to the UN as a major achievement, and then fails to perform the basic administrative step of notifying the committees that make the law functional.
This isn’t a “gap.” It’s a void.
The human cost of this administrative failure is documented in our own national newspapers. In October 2024, an editorial, “Pakistan’s children in prison,” noted that 385 juvenile offenders were languishing in Sindh’s prisons. They are, the editorial states, “treated like adult criminals”, the very thing the 2018 Act was designed to prevent.
My conclusion was stark: The JJSA 2018 is not a tool for justice. It is an act of “legislative compliance” that serves as a paper shield, masking the state’s complete failure to act.
The 2% emergency
Next, I followed the money. The Prime Minister’s 2024 declaration of a national “education emergency” is a powerful piece of rhetoric. The number is staggering: 26 million out-of-school children. The provinces, which control education spending, responded with massive budget allocations. Sindh, for example, allocated a total of Rs 465.4 billion for education in its 2024-25 budget.
This is where my policy implementation audit found its “smoking gun.”
Governments don’t just allocate money; they have to spend it. And they are required to publish reports on how well they are doing. I dug into the provincial finance department websites, looking for Budget Execution Reports (BERs). These are the state’s own quarterly report cards, showing how much money actually went out the door.
I navigated to S40 – school education department in the Q1 2024-2025 Budget Execution Report for the Government of Sindh and the numbers stopped me cold.
In the first quarter of the fiscal year, the department had utilised only 18% of its total modified budget. But the real story was buried in the line item for “Development Expenditure”, the money for new infrastructure, for building the new schools needed to house those 26 million children.
The utilisation rate for Sindh’s School Education development budget in the first quarter was 2%.
Let me be clear. The government allocated funds for new schools, in the middle of a declared “education emergency,” and in the first three months, it managed to spend only two percent of that money.
Implementation gap in its purest form, not a crisis of funding, but a crisis of execution. It is an administrative state so paralysed by its own procurement rules, bottlenecks, and inertia that it is incapable of spending the money it has already pledged.
This single, official data point, published by the Sindh Finance Department itself, proves that the “emergency” rhetoric is undermined by a hard reality of administrative paralysis. My investigation was now demanding an on-ground follow-up: Why is that 98% unspent?
Absence as evidence
I applied this “Follow the Money” method everywhere. If a government claims it is building “Child Protection Units” or “Juvenile Rehabilitation Centers,” there must be a public paper trail. There must be a tender on the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) portals or the Sindh SPPRA portal. A budget line is an intent to spend. A tender is an action to spend.
I systematically searched these public portals for tenders related to “school construction,” “juvenile justice committee” setup, or “child protection unit” operational funds from 2023-2025, but found no significant, systemic results.
Absence as evidence is a powerful investigative technique.The absence of public tenders is a verifiable data point that proves the “intent” (the law) never translated into “action” (the procurement).
I used triangulation, to compare one official source against another to find contradictions. The results were damning, especially on child labour.\
In its UN reports, Pakistan states it has ratified all key ILO conventions and has laws to abolish bonded labour. The ILO Committee of Experts’ 2023 observations note complaints from Pakistani trade unions about the “alleged absence of implementation” of these very laws.
Judicial findings were the most powerful evidence. In June 2023, a national newspaper reported that the Lahore High Court had to issue a direct order to the government to “eliminate forced child labour”. This isn’t an activist’s claim; this is a co-equal branch of government (the judiciary) formally documenting the implementation failure of another (the executive).
Independent data search provided 2024 reports estimating that 700,000 children remain in bonded labour, primarily in brick kilns and agriculture.
By triangulating these four public sources, I can verifiably state that the government’s official report to the UN is directly contradicted by a UN body, its own High Court, and independent reports.
The invisible children
Sometimes the failure isn’t a broken law; it’s an ignored recommendation. In 2016, the UN Committee, in its concluding observations, gave Pakistan a clear, simple instruction: “launch a mass cost-free birth registration campaign”. This is Article 7 of the CRC: the right to a name and nationality. Without this single piece of paper, a child is invisible. They cannot be enrolled in school, access healthcare, or be protected by the juvenile justice system.
Nine years later, as my investigation confirmed, this is still not a national policy. I found Unicef’s 2024 annual report, which notes that Sindh finally waived birth registration fees this year. This is a positive step, but it’s a provincial exception, not the national rule.
And for the most vulnerable, the gap is a chasm. I looked at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees data for Pakistan. As of 2024, only 28.59% of refugee children under the age of 5 have their births registered.
The consequence of this failure is catastrophic and measurable. The same UNHCR data shows that because these children lack documentation, their access to education is blocked. Only 53.6% of refugee children are enrolled in primary school. By secondary school, that number plummets to a shocking 17.29%.
By failing to implement a simple, nine-year-old recommendation for free birth registration, the state is actively creating a generation of invisible, uneducated, and unprotected children.
This pattern repeated itself with our Child Protection Units. Provincial laws for them exist (in Punjab, Sindh, and KP). But I found a 2024 UNFPA costing study from KP showing that operational funding for these services is “less than half” of the required amount. UNICEF reports these units cover only 42 districts nationwide, out of more than 160.
The state has built the signboard for the Child Protection Authority, but has not paid for the staff or operations.
From rhetoric to reality
After months of this document-based audit, my compliance scorecard for Pakistan is clear and bleak.
We have the NCRC Act, the JJSA 2018, and provincial protection acts. Money is allocated, but it’s often insufficient, as the KP funding gap shows, and far below the 4-6% of GDP recommended for education. The 2 % development spending rate in Sindh’s education budget says it all. The Juvenile Justice System? Well, a law that is unknown to its own prosecutors is not a law at all.
When the Lahore High Court has to order the government to do its job and 700,000 children remain in bondage, the system is a failure. The birth registration process is fragmented and donor-driven, but there is no national, state-owned policy to make it free and universal, as the UN recommended nine years ago.
Pakistan has mistaken reporting for implementation. We have built a hollow architecture, and our children are falling through the cracks.
A way forward
The crisis is not one that requires new laws or massive new budgets. It requires administrative and political will. The Juvenile Justice System Act 2018 is ed because the Juvenile Justice Committees are not notified. The provincial home departments must, within 30 days, gazette and notify the members of the JJSA committees in all 160+ districts. This administrative action costs almost nothing and would unlock the entire law.
The 2% failure rate in Sindh because they publish a clear Budget Execution Report. This is not a national standard. The federal and provincial Finance Divisions must adopt a formal “child-sensitive budgeting” (CSB) model, as promoted by Unicef and the World Bank. This “tags” every rupee meant for a child, from allocation to expenditure, making the “implementation gap” transparent and trackable for everyone.
The Controller General of Accounts (CGA) and all provincial finance departments must be mandated to publish quarterly budget execution reports for all child-centric sectors (Education, Health, Child Protection). If a 2% spending rate is published in Q1, it can be fixed in Q2.
NCRC, our national watchdog is funded by a grant from the very ministry it may need to investigate. This is a conflict of interest. The NCRC Act 2017 must be amended to give the commission a ring-fenced, autonomous budget charged directly to the Federal Consolidated Fund — a global best practice for independent human rights bodies.
As per the National Zero-Fee Birth Registration Policy, a UN recommendation in 2016, a federal directive must waive all fees for B-Form/birth certificate issuance via NADRA and Union Councils, nationwide. This single policy would make millions of children visible.
My findings are not an endpoint, but an invitation to my colleagues in the field, to our parliamentary committees, and to our civil society.
For 35 years, Pakistan has built a comprehensive legal architecture for child rights. From the NCRC Act to the JJSA and provincial protection laws, the state has proven it can write modern, compliant legislation. But our public records confirm that this is a paper house in which no one lives.
The laws live in books, the committees unformed, court orders not enforced, and allocated money unspent. In the 2025 review by the UN Committee, the challenge is no longer legislation, but execution. The 26 million children out of school are not a failure of law; but a failure of administrative will and financial accountability.
On this Universal Children’s Day, sit down with children, hear what they have to say about their rights in our country then start implementing our promises with their feedback.
About the Author
The writer is a human rights expert, filmmaker & researcher and can be reached at qashif.mirza@gmail.com and (X) @qashifmirza
