MPs urge family ministry to expedite orders on child protection

Members of the Committee on Unity, Human Rights, and Fight against Genocidehave urged the Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion to speed up the establishment of two orders that would help implement provisions of the law relating to the protection of the child. They made the call Friday during a session with the Minister in charge of the ministry. They include order by the Minister determining modalities for the creation of social welfare institutions, requirements to be met by those institutions and modalities for their supervision, and the order of the Minister determining the modalities for placement in a foster family. The MPs argued that the delay in setting up of such institutions was a challenge as there are children, especially those with disabilities who were on the streets or are poorly cared for in families. MP Elisabeth Mukamana, the Committee Chairperson said that according to the Prime Minister’s instructions of 2013 governing the publication of laws and orders, the latter should be issued three months after a law is published in the official gazette. “What is the progress on the establishment of such institution given that it has huge responsibilities?” the Committee Chairperson wondered. She said the child right protection policy that was developed in 2011, and the constitution provide that a child should be raised in family. Amb. SolineNyirahabimana, Minister of Gender and Family Promotion first apologised for the delay in the establishment of the orders, but said that they are expected to be available within about two months, indicating that they will first be approved by the cabinet. She told lawmakers that the ministry had prepared the orders [in Kinyarwanda] and took them to the Rwanda Law Reform Commission for review, adding that it later returned them to the ministry for translation into English and French. The draft order on the institutions provided for in the law contains information comprising the services that a child should be offered such as access to quality education, and leisure, as well as the standards that such institutions should meet for the child’s effective growth and improved welfare. “We promise you that we are going to follow up on that so that it gets expedited,” she told parliamentarians. MPs said that given the persistent problem of street children, institutions are needed to give them care before they get a family to adopt them. Nyirahabimana pointed out that children with disabilities hardly find foster families. “Receiving children with special needs [children with disabilities] is not easy because it implies extra responsibility and means which even caring people or families cannot afford. So, they are not ready to foster them,” she said. Article 17 of the same law stipulates that a child is placed in a social welfare institution by the competent authority if he/she is deprived of his/her parents and has not yet found a foster family; or he/she is born in prison and at three years of age none of his/her relatives has accepted to receive him/her. A Comprehensive Assessment of the Street Children Phenomenon in Rwanda, a study commissioned by the National Commission for Children, and published in May, 2019 counted 2,882 street children in the country. 55.5 percent of them indicated that they had never been taken off the street and placed into a center, be ita rehabilitation or a transit center. According to the study, this suggests that the majority of street children never have chance to benefit from reeducation and/or rehabilitation services usually offered by assisting institutions. editor@newtimesrwanda.com

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MPs urge family ministry to expedite orders on child protection