Executive summary        [ Go to Contents ]

In her progress report, the Special Rapporteur on the right to education notes difficulties in the carrying out of her mandate which originate in inadequate servicing by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and also points out an innovative facet she has introduced, follow-up to her country missions, following the Commission. s emphasis on promoting the right to education.

The report summarizes recent work by the human rights treaty bodies and her related activities. She briefly describes joint meetings and incipient cooperation, building towards collaborative approaches to the right to education and possibly also joint activities. This is followed by a short summary of ongoing activities within the United Nations, noting the Special Rapporteur. s cooperation with UNESCO, UNICEF and ILO. An account of the ongoing Jomtien+10 process will be included in her oral report to the Commission.

With regard to difficulties in the realization of the right to education, the Special Rapporteur repeats her earlier decision not to approach Governments with requests for general information and thanks those which responded to her inquiries about particular difficulties brought to her attention, as well as to her appeals for particularly important domestic jurisprudence on the right to education. She points out that particular incidents or precedent-setting court cases should not shift attention away from the fact that education remains beyond the reach of an unknown - but large - number of children who are not administratively and statistically recorded, illustrating the range of countries in which child registration at birth is not all-encompassing in table 1.

The report focuses on international cooperation from the viewpoint of financial obstacles to the realization of the right to education, especially at the level of primary education. The Special Rapporteur describes and discusses the continuously diminishing aid flows and the relative increase of aid for education, especially by multilateral agencies. Table 2 provides a bird. s-eye view of bilateral aid for education and points out differences in the orientation of this aid, which may be slanted towards education of foreign students in the donor country rather than basic education in the recipient. s. The lack of coherence in international aid policies is discussed by highlighting the varying status of education, which is defined as a need or a right, subsumed under social development or poverty eradication. The section on international cooperation ends with the Special Rapporteur. s critique of the World Bank. s recent education sector strategy. She points out discrepancies between the Bank. s commitment to promoting basic education and to increasing its education lending and discusses the need to apply pertinent international and domestic law. The Special Rapporteur has planned a meeting with the World Bank and will supplement this part of her report orally.

The Special Rapporteur has continued applying her 4-A scheme (availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability) to analyse governmental obligations corresponding to the right to education. Deepening her inquiry into availability of schooling, she looks into State and non-State schools and the human rights jurisprudence relating to State funding for private schools, also discussing school vouchers. In addition, she emphasizes key facets of the persistently inadequate attention to teachers in international and domestic education strategies.

As announced in her preliminary report, the Special Rapporteur focuses in this report on school fees in examining accessibility. She points out that the requirement that only primary education be provided free of charge represents a global minimum, depicting the correspondence and difference between primary and compulsory education in table 3. Illustrations for the pattern of school fees in primary schooling are derived from States. reports under the human rights treaties and their examination by the treaty bodies. Even if not all-encompassing, they point to the States. lack of capacity to finance education as the driving force behind school fees. In the Special Rapporteur. s view, this reinforces the need to mainstream the human rights approach in education from the local to the global level so as to simultaneously enhance both the capacity and the willingness of all relevant actors to prioritize education.

Continuing her approach to double mainstreaming (i.e. merging human rights and gender throughout education), the Special Rapporteur discusses acceptability by addressing pregnancy as a disciplinary offence. She highlights recent human rights jurisprudence which reinstated an expelled pregnant girl in school, having defined her expulsion as a human rights violation. Because pregnancy is biologically confined to one sex while caused by interaction between the two, the Special Rapporteur deems that keeping pregnancy out of schooling (by keeping sex education out of the curricula and expelling pregnant girls) withholds from children and young people of both sexes a crucial part of their education.

The final section of the report addresses implications of the human-capital approach and international trade in education services for human rights. The Special Rapporteur reiterates and expands upon her critique of the human-capital approach, pointing out the impoverishment of education that would result from a sole focus on economically relevant skills and knowledge. She then examines the global disparities in the outcomes of public investment in education. Because upper secondary education is deemed necessary for the creation and perpetuation of human capital, table 4 summarizes secondary school enrolments, highlighting the disparity between OECD and non-OECD countries. Against this background, the Special Rapporteur discusses the export of education services from OECD to non-OECD countries, pointing out the need for mainstreaming human rights into the emerging legal regulation of trade in education services.

Concluding remarks summarize the Special Rapporteur. s plans for the future.

Introduction        [ Go to Contents ]

1. The Commission on Human Rights outlined the terms of reference of the Special Rapporteur in two key resolutions on the right to education adopted at its fifty-fifth session. Resolution 1999/25 accentuated the importance of international cooperation in the realization of economic, social and cultural rights, supporting the Special Rapporteur. s planned focus on the elimination of financial obstacles for the realization of the right to education, especially at the level of primary education ¹. Resolution 1999/80 on the rights of the child included a special section on the promotion of the right of the child to education ². The Special Rapporteur has focused her work and this report on the priorities thus identified by the Commission.

2. The Special Rapporteur wishes to acknowledge with gratitude support for her mandate, especially external funding, which has enabled her to surmount the lacking servicing by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ³. The Special Rapporteur has heard various explanations for the inadequate servicing of her mandate and could not discern what the underlying problems are. Rather than lamenting such a state of affairs, she has done the necessary work herself. The Special Rapporteur would like to thank individual Governments, UNICEF, her colleagues in thematic and treaty human rights bodies, academic institutes, non-governmental organizations and individual students, for helping her to carry out her mandate.

3. Because of her late appointment in 1998, the Special Rapporteur was able to carry out two missions in 1999 although the funding for her mandate, regretfully, anticipates no more than one annual five-day mission. She carried out a mission to Uganda from 26 June to 2 July 1999 (see E/CN.4/2000/6/Add.1) and another to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from 18 to 22 October 1999 (see E/CN.4/2000/6/Add.2). Guided by the emphasis on promoting the right to education in her mandate, she has initiated follow-up to her country missions, so that the mission reports would constitute the beginning of a process rather than a self-contained activity. She returned to Uganda from 20 to 26 November 1999, upon the invitation of UNICEF, to participate in the planning of the Government of Uganda-UNICEF programme of collaboration for 2001-2005 and has continued to cooperate with UNICEF in the operationalization of rights-based programming. She has also started corresponding with the Government of the United Kingdom with a view to following up her visit as soon as she finalized drafting her mission report.

I. OVERVIEW OF UNFOLDING DEVELOPMENTS AND RELATED ACTIVITIES OF THE SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR
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4. A great deal of activity has marked the field of education and many developments are ongoing. In order to keep the Commission informed of the unfolding developments within the reporting cycle and space constraints, the Special Rapporteur has confined this report to brief descriptions of pertinent activities and will update them in her oral report to the Commission.

A.Human rights treaty bodies        [ Go to Contents ]

5. During the sixth meeting of Special Rapporteurs (31 May-3 June 1999), the first joint meeting with chairpersons of human rights treaty bodies took place and the Special Rapporteur has followed up the thrust of this meeting by establishing dialogue with individual treaty bodies. The right to education pertains to them all, albeit in its different facets, and the Special Rapporteur therefore felt that she should take the initiative to approach the treaty bodies individually with a view to identifying issues of common concern and possibilities for cooperation and joint activities.

6. The Special Rapporteur has continued collaborating with the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the follow-up to the general discussion on the right to education on 30 November 1998. The Committee adopted a general comment on article 14 (plans of action for primary education) and another on article 13 (the right to education) ⁴, with the Special Rapporteur contributing to both processes. The Special Rapporteur had an informal meeting with the Committee on the Rights of the Child on 29 September 1999, which revealed a large number of issues for further dialogue as well as opportunities for collaboration. She is planning to have a meeting with the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in March 2000 and thereafter also meetings with the Human Rights Committee and the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

B. Recent activities within the United Nations        [ Go to Contents ]

7. The Fourth Global Meeting of the International Consultative Forum on Education for All will take place in Dakar from 26 to 28 April 2000 and is expected to adopt a framework for action entitled "Education for all: meeting our commitments". This meeting is referred to as Jomtien+10 and it is based, as the title of the draft final document indicates, on the acknowledgement that commitments made at Jomtien in 1990 have not been met. Indeed the 1990 commitment had been to achieve universal primary education for all by the year 2000; the target year was postponed to 2015 at the Social Summit in 1995. The Special Rapporteur is providing input into the preparatory process for Jomtien+10 whenever asked to do so, and is closely monitoring the ongoing process of assessing the education performance in the period 1990-1999. Preliminary results were not available at the time of writing and will be included in her oral report to the Commission in April 2000.

8. The Special Rapporteur paid a visit to UNESCO from 4 to 11 June 1999, introduced her mandate through an internal seminar and had a series of meetings with UNESCO and Education for All (EFA) officials. Her collaboration with UNESCO has continued through the Protocol of Cooperation with UNESCO/International Bureau of Education (IBE), concluded on 1 October 1999, as well as through her contribution to the preparation of the World Education Report 2000 devoted to the right to education. She is also a member of the Advisory Panel for the UNDP Human Development Report 2000, which is also devoted to human rights. The coincidence of two major annual reports - those of UNESCO and UNDP - devoted to human rights testifies to the elevated visibility of human rights within the United Nations and specialized agencies. These initiatives may well lead to the mainstreaming of human rights throughout the United Nations and the promoting of rights-based development.

9. The Special Rapporteur has continued her close cooperation with UNICEF on a variety of issues related to the conceptualization and operationalization of the right to education. She would like to acknowledge her gratitude to UNICEF for exchanging experiences and ideas with her and for supporting her work. She has also developed cooperation with the International Labour Organization, especially relating to the role of education in the elimination of child labour and to trade union freedoms of teachers, and is planning to broaden it in 2000 to indigenous rights.

C. Identification of difficulties in the realization of the right to education        [ Go to Contents ]

10. The Commission in its resolution 1998/33 prioritized the Special Rapporteur. s task of monitoring and reporting on the realization of the right to education, with a particular emphasis on the difficulties that may be encountered in this process. This task is permanent and the Special Rapporteur has endeavoured to replicate the procedure set up for other mandates, while keeping to the minimum requests to Governments to provide her with information. As noted in her preliminary report, she has not sent out any general request for information but has approached specific Governments for clarification when particular difficulties concerning the right to education were brought to her attention, or when she has obtained information about important domestic jurisprudence relating to the right to education. She wants to acknowledge with appreciation the cooperation extended her by all Governments she has approached thus far.

11. Specific instances brought to the Special Rapporteur. s attention or court cases concerning the right to education reveal some difficulties but do not reflect the scope of the challenge in securing access to primary school for all children. The Special Rapporteur is particularly concerned about the continuing lack of information relating to the numbers of children who should be in school but are not, as she noted in her preliminary report. The existing estimates of the number of out-of-school children demonstrate the poverty of our knowledge. In 1996, the EFA estimate of out-of-school children in the 6-11 age group was 110 million; the UNICEF estimate was 140 million ⁵. The exact numbers cannot be ascertained because the latest population census was held in some countries more than 15 years ago ⁶ while registration of children at birth, mandated by the Convention on the Rights of the Child as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, has not yet been put into practice. Table 1 summarizes the results of the recent UNICEF overview of gaps in registration at birth and thus in the realization of "the first right" of the child, namely the right to be registered at birth.

No Data     Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic,Côte d. Ivoire, Democratic People. s Republic of the Congo, Democratic People. s Republic of Korea, Ecuador, Georgia, Haiti, Iraq, Laos People. s Democratic Republic, Madagascar, Nepal, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Republic of the Congo, Senegal,South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Viet Nam   No birth registration system     Côte d. Ivoire, Democratic People. s Republic of the Congo, Democratic People. s Republic of Korea, Ecuador,Georgia, Haiti, Iraq, Laos People. s Democratic Republic,Madagascar, Nepal, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Republic of the Congo, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, VietNam   Less than 30% of children registered     Angola, Bangladesh, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Zambia   Less than 50% of children registered     Botswana, Burma/Myanmar, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, Guinea,India, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Sudan, Uganda, Yemen, Zimbabwe