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The Right to Education Project (RTE) is a public access human rights resource, the only such site in the world devoted solely to the right to education. It was started by Katarina Tomasevski, the first ever Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, after her appointment in 1998.

RTE defends the right to education and human rights in education, and promotes enhancement of all human rights through education. As a specialized applied research project, we carry out assessments of the global realization of the right to education, provide input for education strategies, and facilitate exposing and opposing human rights violations.

Table 1: Countries without free public primary education available to all school age children by region
Table 2: The law and practice in Sub-Saharan Africa
Table 3: Primary education in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: Legally free, really un-free
Table 4: Guarantees of free education: The law and practice in Asia
Table 5: Free education in the law and practice in Middle East and North Africa
Table 6: The law and policy on free education in Latin America
Table 7: Constitutional guarantees of free and for-fee education in the Caribbean

Has the Right to Education a Future Within the United Nations? A Behind-the-Scenes Account by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education 1998–2004
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights is dead! What is should have done to strengthen the right to education and what it did instead is described in this article.

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Why would the global educational landscape amaze a visiting Martian? Read Katarina Tomasevski's article : ''Removing obstacles for the right to education: Where are we today, how we got where we are and what next?'' Read the full text here... »		''Not education for all, only for those who can pay: The World Bank's model for financing primary education'' describes the continuing economic exclusion of the poor, embodied in the very model of educational financing. You can read the full text here... »

eBook Download ::
Manual on Rights-based Education:
Global Human Rights Requirements Made Simple
by Katarina Tomasevski

Collaborative project between the UN Special Raporteur on the Right to Education and UNESCO Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education
Bangkok: UNESCO Bangkok, 2004, 60 p.
ISBN 92-9223-023-9

This manual was originally prepared as a background paper by Katarina Tomasevski for the Regional Workshop on Universalizing the Right to Education of Good Quality: A Rights-based Approach to Archieving Education for All in Manila, Philippines, 29-31 October 2002. The aim of this manual is to provide an easily-referenced, one-stop guide to rights-based education, which makes sense of the bewildering array of global human rights documents and draws on numerous country-specific examples.

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Download PDF File from RTE site »

At What Age?...are school-children employed, married and taken to court?
Second Edition launched 20th April 2004

Children's right to education is currently under threat from early marriage, child labour and imprisonment; States have not adapted their legislation in favour of the right to education, and they do not have agreed standards for the transition from childhood to adulthood either internationally or nationally.In the same country, it is not rare to find that children are legally obliged to go to school until they are 14 or 15 years old but a different law allows them to work at an earlier age or to be married at the age of 12 or to be criminally responsible from the age of 7."

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