Amnesty International yesterday accused South Asian governments of ignoring "a litany of abuse" against children ranging from bonded labour to selling them into prostitution.
"They [the governments] have failed to raise concerns about abuses. They have sided with the perpetrators," an Amnesty spokeswoman, Ms Angelika Pathak, said at a news conference held to present the report.
She urged the governments of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka to match their signatures on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child with action.
"All of them have failed to fully implement the obligations they have assumed," she said. One-quarter of the world's children live in South Asia.
The report called for action on child rights to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
"All over the South Asia region, children can be seen working in factories, mines, brick kilns and brothels. They find themselves trapped in a cycle of poverty, growing up illiterate, unskilled and prone to involvement in crime," the report said.
"Yet children continue to be ill-treated in the custody of the state as it administers juvenile justice, are left unprotected in the family and community and suffer the consequences of living in the midst of armed conflict. The gap between rhetoric and reality must be closed for each and every child in South Asia. A massive 40 per cent of the region's population are children - they are the adults of tomorrow and their childhood must be protected," it said.
The report cited these cases:
In India a High Court committee found children detained by police were subject to "shockingly savage and barbarous treatment" including electric shocks and piercing of private parts with sticks covered with chilli-powder and petrol.
In Sri Lanka a boy of 12 was stripped by police and beaten repeatedly with a broken wooden bat after being picked up on suspicion of links with separatists.
In Bangladesh, a boy spent 12 years in prison, held in leg irons for almost the entire time. His detention was later found to be illegal.
In Pakistan, some bonded labourers are held in private jails controlled by landlords. Children as young as a few months old were held in a rural jail in Sindh province, where girls were repeatedly raped by the landlord and his sons.
More than 9,000 girls are sold each year from Nepal and Bangladesh - destined for a life of sexual slavery in India and Pakistan.
Armed groups in the region have deliberately killed, tortured, raped and intimidated children, and recruited them to fight as soldiers, despite safeguards in international humanitarian law which forbid these activities.
Many children from Madarsas (religious schools) in Pakistan have been sent to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban Islamic militia.
In Sri Lanka, six children were among 42 unarmed civilians deliberately killed by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam separatists.
In Afghanistan, in a massacre of 70 civilians, the Taliban killed and decapitated an eight-year-old boy and reportedly held down two 12-year-old boys and broke their arms and hands with stones.
Meanwhile nearly 1,000 children and human rights activists marched through the streets of the Nepali capital, Kathmandu, carrying placards demanding children's rights.
"Our aim is to draw the attention of the governments of the region to the rights of children," said Mr Binod Nepal, chief of the Nepal Chapter of Amnesty International. He said many Nepali children were forced into child labour and other "inhuman" forms of abuse due to abject poverty and illiteracy.
There are few reliable data on the numbers of child labourers in tiny, land-locked Nepal, but recent reports have highlighted children being forced into bonded labour, prostitution and the garment and carpet industries.
Mr Nepal said an age-old tradition of Deoki, in which young girls are given away by their poor parents to Hindu temples in some remote areas, was still prevalent in the kingdom. Child marriage also contributed to the break-up of families, he said.