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)