Ministry announces new children’s rights plan

ANKARA

Within the scope of its latest course of action for children’s rights, the Family and Social Services Ministry has announced the Türkiye Child Rights Strategy Document and Action Plan for 2023-2028, prioritizing children’s law and psychology.

Prepared under the coordination of the Family and Social Services Ministry, the action plan outlines more than 150 actions under six main topics.

The plan, which prioritizes child-friendly justice and legislation, also includes objectives such as ensuring that the legislation on children is collected in a single source and made accessible and strengthening the legislation to protect children from all kinds of abuse.

The plan also aims at working to use the definition of “child alleged to have been dragged into a crime” instead of using the term “child dragged into a crime” during the trials of children.

Introducing mandatory courses on child law and child psychology in the curriculum of law faculties and police academies/schools was also one of the staples of the action plan.

Practices under the Child Protection Law will also be analyzed and necessary revisions will be made to the law.

It was also noted that all institutions and organizations serving children should be prepared for any kind of natural disasters, crises and emergencies. In this context, a special tracking system will be established for infants and children in order to track the identity, incident location, family information, medical conditions and referral information of children during search and rescue operations and patient transfer processes.

The plan also included statistical data on children. Accordingly, 22,578,378 (which corresponds to 26.5 percent) of the country’s population of 85,279,553 people consists of children. Of the child population, 51.3 percent (11.5 million) consists of boys and 48.7 percent (10.9 million) of girls.

According to the Turkish Statistical Institute’s (TÜİK) data from 2020, the number of working children in the 5-17 age group reached a whopping 720,000. When analyzed by age group, 64 percent of working children in the 5-14 age group were working in agriculture, while 51 percent of children in the 15-17 age group were working in the service sector.