Emergencies and conflict

Important: The INEE Minimum Standards for Education in Emergencies are currently being revised. Learn here how you can support this process.

The right to education in times of conflict, post-conflict reconstruction and natural disasters is a very complex and hugely challenging field. It is about distinguishing and using the International Human Rights Law (the Law of Peace) and International Humanitarian Law (the Law of War and refugees).

It is about knowing the role of these and national laws in situations of seemingly lawlessness, and about keeping checks on the prime duty-bearers – the governments and the international community – so that they do not falter in their commitment to providing education: in the local communities, near the affected areas, in the camps, for the internally displaced persons (IDPs) and the many refugees that may have spilled over the borders, for those former child soldiers that must be reintegrated and helped to regain their lost childhoods, and for the many whose livelihoods have been fundamentally affected, by war, natural disasters and ecological catastrophy.

On this website we are in the process of updating our resources on education in emergencies and conflict. For the moment we should like to refer to the following places for more information:

- Our own pages on refugees and IDPs, to be found in this section for excluded and vulnerable.

- The site of the International Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) with their world-wide institutional outreach and their valuable Minimum Standards on Education in Emergencies. Their Global Consultation, held every 5 years, most recently took place in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2009, and brought together the leading experts in the field. The Right to Education Project was there too, advocating for a continued focus on the law and on a rights based approach to ensuring education in emergencies.

- The pages of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a valuable resource on the right to education in emergencies as a result of their General Day of Discussion on this topic in 2008, where also the Right to Education Project was present and advocated for framing education related responses to emergencies in the 4A scheme: Availability, Accessibility, Adaptability and Acceptability. This discussion at the CRC was followed up by a debate at the UN General Assembly in New York in 2009.