Govt, Unicef to set up children's rights body
Govt, Unicef to set up children's rights body
JAKARTA (JP): Ministry of Social Services and Unicef
officials announced Saturday plans to establish the Child
Protection Institute.
Sudarmanto, of the ministry's social welfare development
office, told a press briefing the concept for the institute arose
from comparative studies in Indonesia, the Philippines and
Vietnam conducted by Unicef (the United Nations International
Children's Fund).
The director of welfare development for children, families and
the elderly, Ferry Johannes, said the institute would focus on
providing for and protecting neglected, exploited and abused
children.
The institute will have offices in all of Indonesia's 27
provinces. At a seminar next month experts and observers alike
will be invited to comment on the proposal.
Trial runs are to be conducted in a number of provinces, and
the results will be submitted for President Soeharto's
examination.
The institute is to be officially launched on July 23 to
coincide with Children's Day and Indonesia's ratification of the
United Nations convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990.
Journalists suggested Saturday that the institute should be
independent and have similar capabilities as the National
Commission on Human Rights. The body should also have strong
research and fact-finding teams in addition to providing legal
assistance, a hotline, a crisis center, a post office box and a
Website.
Ferry insisted the body would not conflict with or duplicate
the work of existing institutes currently handling children's
issues, like the University of Indonesia's criminology unit for
abused children.
The latest data on sexually abused children between the ages
of zero and 18 was 282 incidents in 1996, with 35.82 percent of
them aged between 10 and 13, 29.08 percent between 14 and 18,
19.5 percent between six and nine, 7.09 percent in the zero to
five age group and 8.51 percent unknown. The data was released in
a report by the Jakarta-based Atma Jaya University research
center.
In Indonesia, children are classified as those under 21 years
old, according to Ferry.
"They are usually considered merely objects, but they are also
subjects whose rights cannot be ignored and must be developed
properly," he said.
Unicef's advocacy and social mobilization project officer,
Widodo Suhartoyo, said the institute's planned approach was to
treat the causes and effects of children's problems in Indonesia.
He admitted that although it was very difficult to eradicate
the dilemmas of child labor, his organization tried to improve
child workers' conditions by humanizing work environments,
limiting working hours to a maximum of four a day and adjusting
the jobs to the individuals' abilities.
Indonesian activist and legislator Nafsiah Mboi has recently
been appointed a member of the UN Committee on the Convention of
the Rights of the Child. (01)