For 23 April, Turkey's National Day of the Child, Turkish lawmaker Suleyman Çelebi tabled a draft proposal to ban child labour, "the fiercest exploitation of labour" in his view. In fact, a million children continue to work illegally in the fields and in factories.

Ankara (AsiaNews/Agencies) - Afiye, a 13-year-old Turkish girl, has worked in the fields since she was 11. Like her, four of her six sisters are paid US$ 15 a day for ten hours of work somewhere in the countryside of southern Turkey. "I would love for all my children to get a decent education," said Celal, Afiye's 43-year-old father, "but we cannot afford it."

For most of the year, the family of eight lives in a tent in a makeshift camp close to the fields amid substandard levels of hygiene and high risk of getting sick.

Afiye belongs to that large but unknown number of underage Turks who every year travel from one part of the country to another in search of seasonal employment. Many of them are forced to help out the family at a very young age. Often, they do not go to school because to do so they would lose valuable hours of work.

On 18 April, Suleyman Çelebi, an MP for Turkey's Republican People's Party (CHP), tabled a bill to fight child labour, calling the latter the "fiercest exploitation of labour".

In 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk dedicated the birth of the Turkish Republic to the country's children. Since then, 23 April has been celebrated as the National Day of the Child. Çelebi's party, the CHP, is steeped in the same ideology as the founding father of the nation.

According to Turkey's Statistics Institute, 292,000 children between the ages of 6 and 14 years work. Another 601,000 between 15 and 17 are also involved in work activities. That is almost 6 per cent of the population under the age of 18. Since 2006, 3,000 more children joined the workforce.

Turkey's GDP reached US$ 775 billion in 2011, with a growth rate of 8.5 per cent over a year before. Yet, despite the country's booming economy, child poverty stands at 23.5 per cent, one of the highest among OECD countries. Overall, almost one million children between the ages of six and 17 years are exploited in the workplace.

Suleyman Çelebi's bill would ban children under 18 from working in heavy industry and at night. It would also increase the age limit at which children can quit primary education from 14 to 15.

There are "no legal, moral or social criteria" by which "we can accept to see a 15-year-old adolescent working on night shift or a 13-year-old getting killed on a farm," the CHP lawmaker said.

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