Authored By: Hamdia Sajjad
Green International University
I. Introduction
Child labour remains one of the most persistent failures of Pakistan’s socio-legal order. Despite a constitutional guarantee against the engagement of children in hazardous work,1 a comprehensive statutory framework built around the Employment of Children Act 1991,2 and international commitments under the Convention on the Rights of the Child3 and ILO Conventions 138 and 182,4 millions of Pakistani children continue to work in conditions that range from merely premature to openly exploitative. The National Child Labour Survey 2019-20 remains the most authoritative national data source on the subject and confirms that child labour is not a marginal phenomenon but a structural feature of the domestic economy.5
This article examines the legal architecture governing child labour in Pakistan, beginning with the constitutional foundation, moving through federal and post-devolution provincial legislation and Pakistan’s international obligations, and then turning to the judicial contribution of the superior courts. It closes by considering the causes of, and enforcement gaps in, the current regime, and by outlining priorities for reform. It argues that the principal deficiency in Pakistan’s response to child labour is not an absence of law but a persistent gap between statutory text and enforcement capacity, compounded by a devolved legislative landscape that has produced inconsistent standards across provinces.6
II. Defining Child Labour: International and Domestic Standards
The International Labour Organization distinguishes ‘child labour’ from mere child employment: not all work performed by children is child labour in the legal sense, since light, age-appropriate work that does not interfere with schooling is generally excluded. Child labour proper denotes work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous or harmful, or that deprives children of their childhood, dignity or schooling.7
Pakistani law does not adopt a single, uniform definition. The Employment of Children Act 1991 defines a ‘child’ as a person who has not completed fourteen years of age, and an ‘adolescent’ as a person who has completed fourteen but not eighteen years.8 This bifurcation matters because certain hazardous occupations are closed to adolescents as well as children, while other, non-hazardous employment is permitted for adolescents subject to conditions on hours and rest. Post-devolution provincial statutes have not preserved a uniform age threshold: the Punjab Restriction on Employment of Children Act 2016 sets the minimum age of employment at fifteen years, while the corresponding Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh statutes retain fourteen years.9 The result is a fragmented definitional landscape in which the legality of a child’s employment can depend on which province the child happens to work in.
III. The Constitutional Framework
Article 11 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973 supplies the foundational prohibition. Article 11(3) provides that no child below the age of fourteen years shall be engaged in any factory, mine or other hazardous employment.10 This sits within a broader constitutional scheme against forced and bonded labour: Article 11(1) forbids slavery, and Article 11(2) prohibits all forms of forced labour and traffic in human beings, a provision the Supreme Court has treated as extending to debt-bonded child labour.11
Three further provisions reinforce this protection indirectly. Article 25-A, inserted by the Eighteenth Amendment, obliges the State to provide free and compulsory education to all children between the ages of five and sixteen years.12 Since a significant proportion of child labour is driven by, and in turn perpetuates, exclusion from schooling, Article 25-A functions as a structural complement to Article 11(3): a child withdrawn into full-time work is, almost definitionally, a child whose Article 25-A entitlement is being denied. Article 37(e), a Principle of Policy, directs the State to make provision for securing just and humane conditions of work, ensuring that children and women are not employed in vocations unsuited to their age or sex, and for maternity benefits for women in employment.13 Article 3 further commits the State to the elimination of exploitation, a principle the Supreme Court invoked directly in condemning bonded labour.14
These provisions do not operate as directly enforceable rights against private employers in the ordinary civil sense; their force has instead been realised primarily through constitutional petitions invoking the superior courts’ writ jurisdiction (under Articles 184(3) and 199), and through the legislative obligations they impose upon the State.
IV. The Statutory Framework
A. Federal Legislation
The principal federal statute remains the Employment of Children Act 1991, which continues to apply in Islamabad Capital Territory and Balochistan following devolution.15 The Act prohibits the employment of children in a schedule of specified occupations and processes, including underground mining, carpet weaving, stone crushing, deep-sea fishing, the handling of pesticides, and the manufacture of explosives and cement.16 For occupations outside this schedule, adolescent employment is permitted subject to regulated hours, a weekly day of rest, and a prohibition on night work. The Act does not, however, raise the minimum age for hazardous work beyond fourteen years in the territories where it still applies, a standard now out of step with Convention 138 and with subsequent provincial legislation.17
Sectoral statutes supplement this framework. The Factories Act 1934 prohibits the employment of a child who has not completed fourteen years in any factory, and imposes certification and working-hour requirements on adolescents.18 The Mines Act 1923 imposes an outright prohibition on the presence of any person below an age threshold in or about a mine.19 The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1992, enacted in the aftermath of Darshan Masih, criminalises the extraction of labour, including child labour, under debt bondage.20 Where child labour shades into trafficking or forced servitude, the Prevention and Control of Human Trafficking Ordinance 200221 and the kidnapping and slavery-related provisions of the Pakistan Penal Code 1860 supply criminal sanction.22
B. Provincial Legislation after the Eighteenth Amendment
The Eighteenth Amendment’s devolution of the labour subject to the provinces23 produced a second generation of child-labour statutes: the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Prohibition of Employment of Children Act 2015,24 the Punjab Restriction on Employment of Children Act 2016,25 and the Sindh Prohibition of Employment of Children Act 2017.26 These statutes generally raise the minimum age for hazardous work to eighteen years, in closer alignment with Convention 182’s ‘worst forms’ standard, and prescribe more stringent penalties than the 1991 Act.27 Punjab has gone further with sector-specific legislation, the Punjab Prohibition of Child Labour at Brick Kilns Act 2016, targeting an industry long associated with intergenerational debt bondage.28
The consequence of this devolved patchwork is uneven protection. Balochistan and Islamabad Capital Territory still operate, at the time of writing, under the 1991 Act’s fourteen-year hazardous-work threshold, while Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have moved to eighteen.29 Notably, none of the general provincial child-labour statutes lists brick-kiln labour generally, or child domestic labour, among the enumerated hazardous occupations, notwithstanding that both sectors are widely documented sites of the worst forms of child exploitation.30 This omission illustrates a recurring weakness in the statutory design: schedules of prohibited occupations, however well-intentioned, tend to lag behind the sectors in which exploitative child labour actually concentrates.31
V. International Obligations
Pakistan’s domestic framework operates against a backdrop of binding and persuasive international obligations. Pakistan ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990,32 ILO Convention 29 on Forced Labour in 1957,33 ILO Convention 138 on the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment in 2006,34 and ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour in 2001.35 Convention 182 is of particular analytical significance because it requires ratifying states to take immediate and effective measures against the worst forms of child labour, defined to include slavery and slavery-like practices, debt bondage, trafficking, and hazardous work likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children, without permitting the gradualist implementation that Convention 138 tolerates for the general minimum-age obligation.36
As an unincorporated treaty obligation within a dualist system, the Convention on the Rights of the Child does not create directly enforceable rights before domestic courts absent implementing legislation. Its principal domestic effect has been interpretive, informing the superior courts’ construction of Articles 9, 14 and 25 of the Constitution in child-rights litigation, and providing the normative vocabulary, such as the ‘best interests of the child’, that increasingly appears in Pakistani case law and provincial statutes.
VI. Judicial Contribution
The single most consequential judicial intervention remains the Supreme Court’s decision in Darshan Masih v The State, in which the Court, exercising its human-rights jurisdiction on a letter treated as a constitutional petition, held that debt-bonded haris, including children working alongside indebted family members, were held in a condition amounting to forced labour prohibited by Article 11(2), and directed their release.37 The judgment did not merely grant relief in the individual case; it catalysed the enactment of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1992,38 making it a rare example in Pakistani constitutional practice of adjudication directly producing legislative reform.
The Federal Shariat Court’s 2005 ruling on bonded labour reinforced this trajectory by rejecting employers’ arguments seeking to defend the peshgi (debt-advance) system on grounds framed in religious and customary terms, thereby closing off an avenue by which the practice might otherwise have been re-legitimised.39 The Supreme Court has periodically revisited the subject through suo motu proceedings and directives aimed at compelling provincial administrations to enforce the bonded-labour and child-labour statutes, reflecting the judiciary’s recognition that enacted law has consistently outpaced its enforcement.
Beyond bonded labour specifically, the courts’ broader child-rights jurisprudence, developed under Articles 9 (life and liberty), 14 (inviolability of dignity) and 25 (equality) of the Constitution, has supplied the doctrinal resources through which child labour cases are increasingly framed, even where the litigation nominally proceeds under a narrower statutory cause of action.
VII. Causes, Scale and Enforcement Gaps
The National Child Labour Survey 2019-20 provides the most recent comprehensive national estimate of the scale of the problem. Its findings, together with subsequent ILO and UNICEF analyses, confirm that child labour in Pakistan is concentrated in agriculture, domestic service, and the informal urban economy, sectors in which regulatory visibility is lowest.40, 41 A significant proportion of working children are simultaneously out of school, corroborating the structural link between Article 25-A’s education guarantee and Article 11(3)’s labour prohibition identified above.42
Three enforcement gaps recur across the literature and the case law. First, labour inspection capacity, a provincial subject since devolution, remains under-resourced relative to the scale of the informal economy, so that statutory prohibitions on hazardous child employment are rarely tested against actual workplaces. Second, the schedules of prohibited hazardous occupations, discussed above, have not kept pace with sectors such as brick kilns and domestic service, leaving significant exploitation formally outside the strictest protections.43 Third, and most fundamentally, poverty remains the principal driver of child labour: households facing income insecurity treat children’s earnings, however modest, as economically indispensable, a dynamic no prohibitory statute can by itself dissolve. The murder of the child bonded-labour activist Iqbal Masih in 1995 remains, three decades later, an emblem of both the human cost of this dynamic and the limits of legal prohibition unaccompanied by economic remedy.44
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s most recent annual assessment continues to document child labour, including in hazardous forms, as an unresolved feature of the national human-rights record, notwithstanding the statutory advances catalogued above.45
VIII. Towards Reform: An Analytical Assessment
Three reform priorities follow from the preceding analysis. First, provincial harmonisation: the divergence between provinces on both the general minimum age of employment and the hazardous-work threshold undermines the coherence of the national framework and creates incentives for employers to relocate exploitative practices to less-regulated jurisdictions. A model law, or a Council of Common Interests-brokered minimum standard building on the eighteen-year hazardous-work threshold already adopted in Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, would close this gap.
Second, schedule modernisation: the lists of prohibited hazardous occupations, whether under the 1991 Act, the Factories Act, or the newer provincial statutes, require periodic, evidence-based revision to capture sectors, such as brick kilns and paid domestic work, that current survey data identify as high-risk but that remain outside the strictest occupational prohibitions.46
Third, and most importantly, enforcement must be linked to the Article 25-A education guarantee rather than treated as a purely punitive, employer-facing exercise. Because the underlying driver of child labour is household economic necessity, effective reform requires that withdrawal from hazardous work be paired with genuine access to free schooling and, where necessary, conditional income support, rather than prosecution alone. The judiciary’s willingness, demonstrated in Darshan Masih, to treat child and bonded labour as a constitutional wrong rather than a mere regulatory infraction remains a valuable resource; what is now required is legislative and administrative capacity equal to that constitutional commitment.
IX. Conclusion
Pakistan’s legal framework against child labour is, on paper, extensive: a constitutional prohibition, a layered federal and provincial statutory scheme, ratification of the relevant ILO Conventions, and a landmark line of Supreme Court authority beginning with Darshan Masih. The persistence of child labour in Pakistan is therefore not, in the main, a failure of legal design but a failure of implementation, compounded by a post-devolution fragmentation that has left provinces at different stages of alignment with international minimum-age standards. Meaningful progress will depend less on further prohibitory legislation than on harmonising existing standards, updating hazardous-occupation schedules to match documented risk, and, above all, treating the Article 25-A right to education as the practical precondition for the Article 11(3) prohibition on child labour to have any effect.
Footnote(S):
1 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 11(3).
2 Employment of Children Act 1991, s 2, s 3.
3 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted 20 November 1989, entered into force 2 September 1990) 1577 UNTS 3, ratified by Pakistan on 12 November 1990.
4 Pakistan ratified ILO Convention 138 (Minimum Age Convention) on 6 July 2006, specifying a minimum age of 14 years.
5 Government of Pakistan, National Child Labour Survey 2019-20 (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2021).
6 Constitution (Eighteenth Amendment) Act 2010, devolving the subject of labour, including child labour legislation, to the provinces under the Fourth Schedule.
7 International Labour Organization, ‘What is Child Labour’ (ILO, 2021) <https://www.ilo.org/ipec/facts/lang–en/index.htm> accessed 20 August 2026.
8 Employment of Children Act 1991 (n 2).
9 Paycheck.pk, ‘Child Labour Law, Children at Work in Pakistan’ (Paycheck.pk, 2025) <https://paycheck.pk/labour-laws/fair-treatment/minors-and-youth/child-labour> accessed 20 August 2026.
10 Constitution of Pakistan 1973, art 11(3) (n 1).
11 Darshan Masih v The State PLD 1990 SC 513.
12 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 25-A, inserted by the Constitution (Eighteenth Amendment) Act 2010.
13 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 37(e).
14 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 3.
15 Employment of Children Act 1991 (n 2).
16 Employment of Children Act 1991, sch (listing occupations and processes, including underground mining, carpet weaving, stone crushing, transport of goods and passengers, and manufacture of explosives, in which the employment of children is prohibited).
17 WageIndicator Foundation, ‘Child Labour and Pakistan’ (WageIndicator, 2025) <https://wageindicator.org/en-pk/work-in-pakistan/labour-law/fair-treatment/child-labour-and-pakistan> accessed 20 August 2026.
18 Factories Act 1934, s 50 (prohibiting employment of a child who has not completed fourteen years of age in any factory).
19 Mines Act 1923, s 24.
20 Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1992, s 4.
21 Prevention and Control of Human Trafficking Ordinance 2002.
22 Pakistan Penal Code 1860, ss 369-374 (kidnapping, abduction and offences relating to slavery and forced labour).
23 Constitution (Eighteenth Amendment) Act 2010 (n 6).
24 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Prohibition of Employment of Children Act 2015.
25 Punjab Restriction on Employment of Children Act 2016.
26 Sindh Prohibition of Employment of Children Act 2017.
27 Paycheck.pk, ‘Child Labour Law, Children at Work in Pakistan’ (n 9).
28 Punjab Prohibition of Child Labour at Brick Kilns Act 2016.
29 WageIndicator, ‘Child Labour and Pakistan’ (n 17).
30 Paycheck.pk, ‘Child Labour Law, Children at Work in Pakistan’ (n 9).
31 Provincial statutes are cited here by their short titles; readers should verify the rules framed under each Act, since substantive obligations are frequently elaborated at the level of subordinate legislation.
32 UNCRC 1989 (n 3).
33 Pakistan ratified ILO Convention 29 (Forced Labour Convention) on 23 December 1957.
34 ILO Convention 138 (n 4).
35 Pakistan ratified ILO Convention 182 (Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention) on 11 October 2001.
36 ibid.
37 Darshan Masih v The State (n 11).
38 Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1992 (n 20).
39 Bonded Labour Case (Federal Shariat Court, October 2005), discussed in ‘Combating Bonded Labour’ The News (Islamabad, 2023) <https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/1037450-combating-bonded-labour> accessed 20 August 2026.
40 National Child Labour Survey 2019-20 (n 5).
41 International Labour Organization and Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, National Child Labour Survey Pakistan 2019-20: Key Findings (ILO 2021).
42 UNICEF Pakistan, ‘Out-of-School Children’ (UNICEF, 2024) <https://www.unicef.org/pakistan/education> accessed 20 August 2026.
43 Paycheck.pk, ‘Child Labour Law, Children at Work in Pakistan’ (n 9).
44 For an account of the case of Iqbal Masih, a bonded child labourer whose activism against the practice preceded his assassination in 1995, see Human Rights Watch, ‘The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labor in Pakistan’ (HRW 1995).
45 Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, State of Human Rights in 2024 (HRCP 2025).
46 Paycheck.pk, ‘Child Labour Law, Children at Work in Pakistan’ (n 9).
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973
Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1992
Employment of Children Act 1991
Factories Act 1934
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Prohibition of Employment of Children Act 2015
Mines Act 1923
Pakistan Penal Code 1860
Prevention and Control of Human Trafficking Ordinance 2002
Punjab Prohibition of Child Labour at Brick Kilns Act 2016
Punjab Restriction on Employment of Children Act 2016
Sindh Prohibition of Employment of Children Act 2017
Darshan Masih v The State PLD 1990 SC 513
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted 20 November 1989, entered into force 2 September 1990) 1577 UNTS 3
ILO Convention 29 concerning Forced or Compulsory Labour (adopted 28 June 1930, entered into force 1 May 1932) 39 UNTS 55
ILO Convention 138 concerning Minimum Age for Admission to Employment (adopted 26 June 1973, entered into force 19 June 1976) 1015 UNTS 297
ILO Convention 182 concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour (adopted 17 June 1999, entered into force 19 November 2000) 2133 UNTS 161
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Government of Pakistan, National Child Labour Survey 2019-20 (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2021)
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, State of Human Rights in 2024 (HRCP 2025)
Human Rights Watch, ‘The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labor in Pakistan’ (HRW 1995)
International Labour Organization and Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, National Child Labour Survey Pakistan 2019-20: Key Findings (ILO 2021)
International Labour Organization, ‘What is Child Labour’ (ILO, 2021) <https://www.ilo.org/ipec/facts/lang–en/index.htm> accessed 20 August 2026
Paycheck.pk, ‘Child Labour Law, Children at Work in Pakistan’ (Paycheck.pk, 2025) <https://paycheck.pk/labour-laws/fair-treatment/minors-and-youth/child-labour> accessed 20 August 2026
UNICEF Pakistan, ‘Out-of-School Children’ (UNICEF, 2024) <https://www.unicef.org/pakistan/education> accessed 20 August 2026
WageIndicator Foundation, ‘Child Labour and Pakistan’ (WageIndicator, 2025) <https://wageindicator.org/en-pk/work-in-pakistan/labour-law/fair-treatment/child-labour-and-pakistan> accessed 20 August 2026
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