The Law Exists But the Children Remain Exploited

Introduction

In 2024, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF jointly reported that approximately 138 million children between the ages of five and seventeen remain engaged in child labour worldwide — a figure representing nearly eight percent of the global child population.[1] This statistic is not merely troubling in isolation. It is troubling because it follows decades of international lawmaking, treaty ratification, domestic legislation, and judicial intervention specifically designed to eliminate the very phenomenon it describes. The world committed under Sustainable Development Goal Target 8.7 to ending child labour by 2025.[2] That deadline has passed. Child labour has not.

The persistence of child exploitation in the face of comprehensive legal prohibition reveals a structural disconnect between the formal architecture of child labour law and the social conditions in which that law must operate. Laws do not enforce themselves. Conventions do not reach children who have never been told they exist. Statutory prohibitions do not alter the economic calculus of a family whose survival depends on a child’s daily wage.

This article argues that the failure to eliminate child labour is not primarily a failure of legal design but a failure of legal delivery — a systemic inability to translate written protections into lived reality for the children most in need of them. It is submitted that three interlocking deficiencies sustain this gap: institutional incapacity in enforcement, structural poverty that renders legal compliance economically irrational, and a pervasive absence of legal awareness among the children the law purports to protect. The article proceeds as follows. Section II sets out the governing international and domestic legal framework. Section III examines the evidentiary picture of child labour globally and in Pakistan. Section IV analyses the relevant Pakistani case law. Section V identifies the structural causes of the enforcement gap. Section VI offers conclusions and recommendations.

The Legal Framework

International Obligations

The international legal regime governing child labour rests principally upon two ILO Conventions. Convention No. 138 on the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment obliges ratifying states to establish a minimum working age not lower than the age of completion of compulsory schooling.[3] Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, which achieved universal ratification by all 187 ILO member states in 2020, mandates immediate and effective measures to eliminate child slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, sexual exploitation, and hazardous work.[4] ILO Recommendation No. 190 supplements Convention No. 182 by specifying categories of work that states must treat as hazardous, including work involving dangerous machinery, toxic substances, underground or underwater conditions, and excessive working hours.[5] The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) provides the foundational human rights framework, recognising in Article 32 the right of every child to be protected from economic exploitation and from work that interferes with education or harms development.[6]

The Domestic Framework in Pakistan

Pakistan has ratified both ILO Conventions and acceded to the CRC, thereby assuming binding obligations under international law. At the constitutional level, Article 11 prohibits all forms of forced labour and expressly bars the employment of children below fourteen years of age in factories, mines, or any other hazardous establishment.[7] Article 25-A, inserted through the Eighteenth Constitutional Amendment in 2010, imposes an affirmative obligation upon the state to provide free and compulsory education to all children between the ages of five and sixteen.[8] Following the devolution of labour authority to the provinces under the same amendment, robust provincial legislation has been enacted. The Punjab Restriction on Employment of Children Act 2016 and the Sindh Prohibition of Employment of Children Act 2017 each raise the minimum age for engagement in hazardous work to eighteen years, and impose penalties including imprisonment and substantial monetary fines upon employers who violate the prohibition.[9] On its face, the legislative framework is coherent and consonant with international standards. The deficit lies entirely in its application.

III. The Scale of the Problem: Global and Domestic Evidence

The ILO-UNICEF Global Estimates 2024 confirm that 137.6 million children are presently in child labour, of whom 54 million are engaged in hazardous work likely to damage their health, safety, or moral development.[10] A particularly alarming dimension of the data concerns age distribution: 79 million of those children — representing 57 percent of the total — are between five and eleven years old.[11] These are children of primary school age. Progress in reducing child labour among this youngest cohort has been slower and more uneven than for older children, and the absolute number of five to eleven year olds in child labour remains higher today than it was in 2012.

The global data also confirms the relationship between instability and exploitation. In countries affected by armed conflict, the child labour prevalence rate reaches 21 percent — more than four times the rate recorded in stable, non-fragile states.[12] Meeting Sustainable Development Goal Target 8.7 by 2030 would require progress at eleven times the current rate of reduction.[13] This trajectory makes plain that incremental improvements within the existing framework are structurally insufficient.

The consequences for education are severe and well-documented. Children in child labour are approximately four times more likely to be absent from school than their non-working peers. Among those engaged in hazardous work, nearly half are entirely excluded from formal education.[14] Data collected across 34 countries demonstrates that children in child labour are more than 30 percent less likely to attain foundational reading and numeracy skills than classmates of equivalent age who do not work.[15] The educational deficit produced by child labour compounds intergenerationally: diminished literacy reduces adult earning capacity, deepens household poverty, and increases the probability that the next generation will also be sent to work.

In Pakistan, the concentration of child labour in sectors structurally resistant to formal inspection compounds these difficulties. Agriculture accounts for the majority of working children. Brick kilns, carpet-weaving workshops, domestic service, and the surgical instrument manufacturing industry in Sialkot together constitute additional high-risk sectors. Domestic work, in particular, takes place in private residences entirely beyond the reach of any labour inspection regime, rendering children employed in this sector effectively invisible to the state and to the law.

Case Law Analysis

Syed Nazeer Agha v Government of Balochistan (PLD 2014 Balochistan 86)

In Syed Nazeer Agha v Government of Balochistan, the Balochistan High Court was petitioned on the ground that the provincial government had failed to supply textbooks to students enrolled in government schools, in violation of the constitutional right to education under Article 25-A.[16] The court’s reasoning extended considerably beyond the immediate complaint. It held that the state’s obligation under Article 25-A is not discharged by the mere physical construction of school buildings or the nominal provision of educational materials. What the constitutional guarantee demands is the creation of a genuinely enabling educational environment: one that is welcoming in its physical design, transparently staffed, properly maintained, and demonstrably worth attending.[17]

This judgment carries direct and significant implications for the child labour problem. The principal reason families send young children to work rather than to school is not indifference to education but rational economic calculation: when schools are understaffed, dilapidated, or functionally non-operative, the opportunity cost of keeping a child in education rather than employment becomes difficult to justify. The court’s direction that the provincial government conduct physical audits of schools, ensure transparent disclosure of teacher deployments, and guarantee that school buildings are designed and maintained to an appropriate standard represents a judicial recognition that the right to education is only meaningful where schools constitute a credible alternative to labour.

Zubair Ahmed Khaskheli v Federation of Pakistan (PLD 2015 Sindh 118)

The Sindh High Court in Zubair Ahmed Khaskheli v Federation of Pakistan addressed a petition seeking the incorporation of fundamental rights and human rights as compulsory subjects within the school curriculum.[18] Reading Articles 25-A, 37, and 38 of the Constitution conjunctively, the court held that the promotion of social and economic well-being requires, as a foundational condition, a citizenry that is aware of its constitutional entitlements. The court directed the Sindh provincial government to introduce human rights and fundamental rights as a compulsory subject at the higher secondary level from the 2015 academic year.[19]

This judgment addresses what this article identifies as one of the most significant but least examined dimensions of the child labour enforcement gap: the relationship between legal awareness and legal protection. A child who has never been informed that the law prohibits her exploitation cannot invoke that law. A family that does not understand that employing a child constitutes a criminal offence cannot be expected to experience the deterrent effect that criminal prohibition is designed to produce. The court’s direction that rights education become a compulsory element of the school curriculum reflects a recognition that legal protection and legal knowledge are inseparable: rights that exist only in statute books, but not in the minds of those they are designed to protect, are rights in name only.

Critical Evaluation: Why the Enforcement Gap Persists

Institutional Incapacity

The ILO’s 2023 assessment of Pakistan’s law enforcement capacity in the field of child labour identifies deep structural deficiencies within the provincial inspectorate system.[20] Labour inspectorates responsible for detecting and prosecuting violations are chronically under-resourced, lacking the staffing, technical training, and financial capacity to conduct meaningful enforcement activity. National enforcement data are not systematically collected, which precludes any reliable assessment of the scale of non-compliance or the effectiveness of enforcement action. Corruption within enforcement agencies — including the acceptance of payments to overlook violations — further erodes the deterrent effect of the legislative framework. A law that can be circumvented for the price of a bribe does not function as a law. It functions as a tax upon compliance that wealthier employers can elect not to pay.

The Structural Poverty Problem

It is submitted that the most fundamental reason child labour laws fail to eliminate child labour is that they prohibit a behaviour — a child working — without addressing the cause — a household that cannot sustain itself without that child’s economic contribution. The legal prohibition is directed at the symptom rather than the disease. Where families face acute poverty, the question of whether child labour is lawful becomes secondary to the question of whether the family will survive. No legal instrument can answer the second question by answering the first. The global evidence bears this out: child labour prevalence in low-income countries approaches one in four children, compared to less than one percent in high-income countries. The law is identical in both contexts. The economic conditions are not.

The Absence of Legal Awareness

A right of which its holder is unaware provides no practical protection. The children most acutely affected by child labour — those working in agricultural fields, brick kilns, domestic service, and informal workshops — are, as a structural matter, the children least likely to have encountered any form of legal education or rights awareness. The insight of the Khaskheli judgment is precisely that this informational deficit is not incidental to the failure of child labour law; it is constitutive of it. Legal protection and legal knowledge must advance together. A statutory prohibition that operates in conditions of systematic legal illiteracy cannot achieve its protective purpose.

The Dignity Deficit

The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) recommended in 2024 that effective enforcement requires dedicated resources directed at high-risk industries, strategic inspection frameworks designed to penetrate informal economic spaces, and community-based partnerships that can reach the settings where child labour is most concentrated.[21] This article endorses that approach and adds a further observation. Beyond the institutional and economic dimensions of the enforcement gap lies a dimension that quantitative analysis cannot fully capture: the impact of child labour upon a child’s developing sense of self-worth and dignity. A child whose formative years communicate — through circumstance rather than instruction — that their value resides in their economic output rather than their humanity absorbs a harm that no subsequent legal remedy can fully repair. The child who begs on the street, who works invisibly in a stranger’s household, who operates machinery built for adults, is not only being deprived of education and opportunity. That child is being taught, by the conditions of their existence, that they do not matter. The law declares that every child has dignity. Social reality, in far too many cases, teaches something different entirely.

Conclusion

This article has argued that the failure to eliminate child labour, despite the existence of a comprehensive international and domestic legal framework, is attributable to three interlocking structural failures: institutional incapacity in enforcement, the persistence of poverty that renders legal compliance economically irrational for vulnerable households, and a systemic absence of legal awareness among the children the law is designed to protect. Each of these failures is independently significant. Together, they produce a gap between what the law promises and what children actually experience that no amount of additional legislation, without corresponding structural reform, will close.

It is submitted that an effective response requires action on four fronts simultaneously. First, provincial labour inspectorates must be substantially strengthened through increased funding, specialist training, and robust anti-corruption accountability mechanisms. Second, legal prohibition must be accompanied by social protection — cash transfers, educational subsidies, and economic support for vulnerable households — so that families possess a genuine alternative to child labour. Third, the constitutional mandate articulated in Syed Nazeer Agha requires national implementation: schools must be made genuinely worth attending if they are to compete with the economic pull of child work. Fourth, and most fundamentally, the vision expressed by the Sindh High Court in Khaskheli must be realised across all provinces: children must be taught their rights, in languages they understand, through institutions they trust.

Child labour is not a legal problem that admits of a purely legal solution. It is a social failure that law has an obligation to address by constructing, not merely declaring, the conditions in which children’s rights can be realised. Until the child on the street knows that the law exists — and until the law can reach that child where they stand — the gap between what is written and what is lived will endure. That gap is not an inevitability. It is a choice. And every state that has ratified ILO Convention No. 182 has assumed the obligation to make a different one.

Reference(S):

Cases

Syed Nazeer Agha v Government of Balochistan PLD 2014 Balochistan 86.

Zubair Ahmed Khaskheli v Federation of Pakistan PLD 2015 Sindh 118.

International Instruments

International Labour Organization, Convention Concerning Minimum Age for Admission to Employment (ILO Convention No 138) (adopted 26 June 1973, entered into force 19 June 1976).

International Labour Organization, Convention Concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO Convention No 182) (adopted 17 June 1999, entered into force 19 November 2000).

International Labour Organization, Worst Forms of Child Labour Recommendation (ILO Recommendation No 190) 1999.

United Nations, Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted 20 November 1989, entered into force 2 September 1990) 1577 UNTS 3.

United Nations General Assembly, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UNGA Res 70/1 (25 September 2015).

Legislation

Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973.

Employment of Children Act 1991 (Pakistan).

Punjab Restriction on Employment of Children Act 2016.

Sindh Prohibition of Employment of Children Act 2017.

Secondary Sources

International Labour Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund, Child Labour: Global Estimates 2024, Trends and the Road Forward (ILO and UNICEF, Geneva and New York 2025).

International Labour Organization, Assessing the Capacity of Law Enforcement Agencies to Address Child Labour in Pakistan (ILO Publishing, Geneva 2023).

Lorena Roque and Sapna Mehta, ‘CLASP Federal Recommendations to Combat Child Labor’ (Center for Law and Social Policy, March 2024).

[1] International Labour Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund, Child Labour: Global Estimates 2024, Trends and the Road Forward (ILO and UNICEF, Geneva and New York 2025) 8.

[2] United Nations General Assembly, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UNGA Res 70/1 (25 September 2015) Target 8.7.

[3] International Labour Organization, Convention Concerning Minimum Age for Admission to Employment (ILO Convention No 138) (adopted 26 June 1973, entered into force 19 June 1976) Art 2.

[4] International Labour Organization, Convention Concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO Convention No 182) (adopted 17 June 1999, entered into force 19 November 2000) Art 3.

[5] International Labour Organization, Worst Forms of Child Labour Recommendation (ILO Recommendation No 190) 1999, para 3.

[6] United Nations, Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted 20 November 1989, entered into force 2 September 1990) 1577 UNTS 3, Art 32.

[7] Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, Art 11.

[8] Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, Art 25-A (inserted by the Eighteenth Amendment 2010).

[9] Punjab Restriction on Employment of Children Act 2016, s 3; Sindh Prohibition of Employment of Children Act 2017, s 4.

[10] ILO-UNICEF (n 2) 8.

[11] ibid 27.

[12] ILO-UNICEF (n 2) 19.

[13] ibid 15.

[14] ibid 43.

[15] ibid 45.

[16] Syed Nazeer Agha v Government of Balochistan PLD 2014 Balochistan 86 (Const Petitions 194 and 216 of 2013, decided 23 October 2013).

[17] ibid.

[18] Zubair Ahmed Khaskheli v Federation of Pakistan PLD 2015 Sindh 118 (Const Petition 3210 of 2011, date of hearing 12 November 2013).

[19] ibid.

[20] International Labour Organization, Assessing the Capacity of Law Enforcement Agencies to Address Child Labour in Pakistan (ILO Publishing, Geneva 2023).

[21] Lorena Roque and Sapna Mehta, ‘CLASP Federal Recommendations to Combat Child Labor’ (Center for Law and Social Policy, March 2024).