Lawyers are mandatorily made to undertake pro bono services before acquiring the licence to practice law in the United States. Agreater purpose is served to voluntarily dispense legal services to promote justice and a sense of responsibility owed towards the weaker members of society, and a greater cause is achieved through the implementation of the American Bar Association Model Rule.
Fortunately for me, I was selected in a prestigious pro bono programme during my Master of Law Studies at UC Berkeley Law. During my pro bono stint in Atlanta, Georgia, in the southeastern region of the US, I worked with ahuman trafficking organisation, and that made me realise the need to pen this column.Human trafficking is “recruitment, sheltering and transporting a person for sex.” The definition may not be exhaustive but includes child sexual exploitation, part of a $290 millionsex trafficking industry, andreceived Georgia government’s attention to amend its legislation for more stringent measures its eradication.
Fragile implementation has made it easy for wrongdoers to survive the cases by offering nominal penalties and serving a light jail term
It may come as a surprise that a developed country like the United States is now putting in efforts to combat child sex trafficking issue that has been lingering for a long time. Efforts of non-profit organisations in Atlanta are being bolstered bygovernment officials to devise new policies and help enforcethem across the state. Some constitutional amendments have been made to create safe spaces for sexually exploited children. A grant ofapproximatelytwo million dollars was approved in 2016; it provides resources such as housing, counselling and medical services to victims. It is a major milestone.
Other than government’sefforts, many legal firms have attracted youth support with the launch of their mentoring and training sessions that have further added ways to dispense survivors with legal services. Initiation of these programmes havecurbed child sex trafficking; 354 minors, every month, were sold off for sex to 7,200 men, according to the statistics disclosed by the state’s attorney general office. Through an effective legislation, penalties and rigorous prison sentences have been tightened.
But what is happening in Pakistan? The parliament recently passed a resolution calling for public hanging of child rapists;it faced opposition in the lower house.Human rights champions took to twitter to declare their oppositionto this non-binding resolution yet to become a law. With the high-profile child sexual abuse cases that are rampant in Pakistan, government could only legislate laws to criminalise sexual abuse against minors and child pornography in 2016, with no dire consequences for the culprits. Pakistan has been under a severe critique in the international media for its lax laws.Fragile implementation has made it easy for wrongdoers to survive the cases by offering nominal penalties and serving a light jail term. Court decisions, due to an inefficient judicial procedure, take a long time, as witnessed in the Zainab rape-murder case.
For most of the human rights activists, public hangingis an act of violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ratified in 2010, but they are probablyunaware that it is the second optional protocol of the same covenant: abolition of death penalty is yet to be signed. Since the brutal terrorist attack on school children in Peshawar, Pakistan has lifted a de facto moratorium on the use of hanging. Capital punishment, though rare in today’s world,is in legal practice in many countries. Japan, India and many former Soviet republics have capital punishments for serious crimes.
It would be unfair to single out Pakistan for its yet-to-be-implemented public executions. Saudi Arabia has done hundreds of public executions to deter future delinquents. Through executing Sharia laws across the country, Saudi Arabia has reached the lowest levels of child rape and sexual assault cases, in contrast to statistics compared with many other developed nations. Even the United States has not ratified covenants to abolish the death penalty, and hanging is carried in the state of Georgia to curb rape crimes.
Our efforts wouldn’t reap fruit unless we hold ourselves back fromcopying laws of the developed countries. For us, stringent measures of public hanging would serve more than decent punishments, though it may not sound pleasing to the Amnesty International and other human rights advocates. But to maintain social equilibrium, it is the necessity of the time to take stringent measures to curb social and moral crises.
The writer reports for Fox News Digital and is a freelance columnist