By Baba Yusuf
Abuja
As Nigeria joins the international community to mark the year 2014 World Day for the Girl Child a non-governmental organization (NGO), Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has called on President Goodluck Jonathan to take stronger policy and legal frameworks to ensure the effective enforcement of the fundamental human rights of the Nigerian children by re-organising the institutional bodies charged with these constitutional duties.
Among the immediate but comprehensive steps recommended by the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria [HURIWA] for implementation is the setting up of a legally protected Presidential Desk for the protection and promotion of the human rights of the Nigerian Children (PDRC) to be directly supervised by the President but coordinated by the wife of the president.
In a statement by the National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and the National Media Affairs Director, Miss Zainab Yusuf, HURIWA said it had become imperative for a presidential desk or commission on the Rights of the Nigerian Child to be set up to coordinate activities related to the enforcement of the rights of the Nigerian children.
HURIWA said: “We hereby appeal to the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to set up a Presidential desk or commission for the promotion and protection of the Rights of the Nigerian Children with the full compliments of very few but highly competent professionally qualified child rights experts to be drawn from already existing Child Rights related agencies. This small but powerful Presidential institution on the rights of the Nigerian Children should be charged with the task of formulating and implementing policy and legal frameworks on behalf of the Nigerian Government in active partnership with relevant agencies. This Presidential desk/commission on the Rights of the Nigerian Children should also work out implementable mechanisms with the ministries of women/children affairs of the 36 states and Abuja with a view to consolidating measures and policy frameworks to check the proliferation of the gross human rights abuses against the Nigerian children.”