There is no time to monkey around on children matters. The Pakistan government has declared that tough times await anyone who engages rape and other related abuses of children.
The country’s parliament passed a resolution Friday calling for the public hanging of convicted child killers and rapists.
The Daily Mail reports that the non-binding resolution follows a spate of high-profile child sex-abuse cases that have provoked outrage and riots across Pakistan in recent years.
Child killers and rapists ‘should not only be given the death penalty by hanging, but they should be hanged publicly,’ said Ali Muhammad Khan, Pakistan’s parliamentary affairs minister, who presented the resolution in the national assembly, or lower house.
‘The Quran commands us that a murderer should be hanged,’ Khan added.
Though a majority of lawmakers approved the resolution, human rights minister Shireen Mazari stressed it was not sponsored by the government.
The resolution ‘on public hangings was across party lines and not a govt-sponsored resolution but an individual act. Many of us oppose it – our MOHR (human rights ministry) opposes this,’ Mazari tweeted.
Child sexual abuses are rampant in Pakistan.
Human rights organisations have long called on Pakistan to reinstate a moratorium on the death penalty, which was lifted after the Army Public School massacre in Peshawar in 2014 that killed 151 people, most of them students.
In October 2018, authorities hanged a child rapist in an infamous case in Kasur, near Lahore, that sparked nationwide protests.
Authorities in Kasur also uncovered a massive paedophilia ring in 2015.
In a scandal that rocked the country, at least 280 children were sexually abused by a gang who blackmailed their parents by threatening to leak the videos.