Katarina Tomaševski Interview in Human Rights Features; 5-12 April 2004

Human Rights Features (HRF): Starting on a general note, you have stated that the right to education is a right threatened with disappearance. Referring to the obligations of Article 14 of the ICESCR (requiring that detailed plans of action be undertaken by states to ensure the progressive implementation of compulsory free education), does it strike you that this right is amongst the most neglected in international human rights law?

Katarina Tomasevski (KT): Yes, indeed you are right. When the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was drafting its general comment on the right to education, it had to conclude that it had received not a single one of detailed plans of action, although almost half the countries reporting to the Committee had to acknowledge that education was neither free, nor compulsory, nor all-encompassing. So indeed, the right to education is neglected and there are too many reasons for this. The first reason for this is [that] requiring governments to adopt detailed plans of action to put primary education into practice without providing them with any assistance is simply not a feasible proposal. So the reason why there are no plans of action is that the government would have to invest its resources to create a plan of action which would remain unfunded. There are plans of action, not for the right to education but for the accomplishment of primary education under poverty reduction strategy papers, which means institutions which do not follow the right to education approach, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, get from heavily indebted countries their poverty reduction strategy papers which have to include allocation for primary education and primary health care. But this is not the right place. There is no guarantee that education should be free; if it is not free then it can't be compulsory, and if it is neither free nor compulsory, it is not all-encompassing. So what happens is that we get most action and funding for education completely outside United Nations human rights bodies.

HRF: Turning to your report, throughout you emphasise the increasing status of education as a traded service, and the consequent need for a human rights curriculum for economists. How do you see such a development unfolding?

KT: It was for me a shocking discovery that around the Commission on Human Rights there is no knowledge nor open acknowledgment of the fact that education has become a traded service, and that 45 countries in the world, including countries which ideologically pursue the right to education, such as the People's Republic of China, have opened their entire education system, from pre-primary to university, to complete privatisation. This means that what we have quite often at the Commission are exercises in empty rhetoric, if not worse, in hypocrisy, with government delegations reciting the right to education rhetoric but in practice, in their own law, education has been completely converted in to traded service, which means that there is no right, that only people with adequate purchasing power can buy education for themselves and for their children, but poor people simply can't get any access to education. And this term 'access' is particularly important because that's the other side of the coin at the Commission, which is the changing language in all resolutions on economic, social and cultural rights, where particularly the delegation of the United States is always suggesting the same linguistic option not to talk about the right to education but about access to education because that covers both purchased education and education as an individual entitlement. Furthermore, there is no concerted opposition by human rights groups. These negotiations and resolutions are not subject to public scrutiny which means that the Commission adopts resolutions that are subsequently every year less and less favourable to economic, social and cultural rights without any public critique addressed to the Commission, which is the human rights Commission. But there is yet another factor which should be emphasised, which is that developing countries which sometimes follow the rhetoric of economic, social, and cultural rights are actually much more supportive of the right to development, because they can define the right to development as the right of the state, and claim that the government of Pakistan or the government of China is entitled to aid from the international community because it is a poor country. If we look at the way China is using its budget, there is an immensely visible priority for military expenditure at the expense of allocation for education. That China took pride in launching their first man into space, which cost billions, but it still will not ensure primary education for all its children. So there are very many layers of what happens within the Commission and then what we get from the Commission's output.

HRF: You cite that the "global consensus on the need for all children to complete primary education prioritises education as a free public service, but refers only to the first phase of schooling, thereby implicitly negating the right to secondary and university education". Could you elaborate on this point?

KT: I can elaborate on this very easily. I would not urge you to read all Commission resolutions because very few people can cope with fivehundred pages. But if you were to look into the resolutions on the right to education, which are only three pages each year, you would see that the right to secondary or university education has completely disappeared. We don't even have the blandest rhetoric coming from the Commission which would say that university education is a part of the right to education. The only mention is primary education, which is immensely dangerous. I'll use one example of Myanmar, formerly Burma. Myanmar defines primary education as only two years, nine to eleven, which means that the government can say that it has accomplished all-encompassing primary education. What we know from all educational research is that this is useless. What is needed is at least five years of education so that people can sustain what they have learned. If it is less, they become functionally illiterate later. Also, coming back to your point about economists, one of my proudest accomplishments has been to learn to talk to the economists, to learn their language, which is a completely different language than human rights language. And we are coming to this very useful point that you raised - primary, secondary, university education, what do we mean? The economists agree on the need for longer primary education because they want education to be supportive of poverty eradication. So there we can establish the common language with the economists. They know that secondary education has crucial importance for the eradication of poverty. Primary education on its own is irrelevant, because if it is only two or three years of education for children, they are prohibited from working because they are children. Such education has absolutely no influence on the level of poverty, so there we can build something of a common framework together with the economists if we could get the UN Commission on Human Rights to openly acknowledge the fact that secondary and university education remain part of the right to education. And there I don't speak about wealthy countries - I happen to teach in one of them - where in Sweden education is still a free public service, we don't charge any tuition, not even at the post-graduate level. Norway follows the same principle. But it's not only about wealth. In Latin-American countries such as Uruguay and Argentina, despite economic difficulties, they still proudly say that education is a right and university education should be free. But there what is necessary is firstly an open political acknowledgement of the fact that it is a human right, not this silent diminishing and revision of the right to education which we can see from the output of the Commission on Human Rights.

HRF: Following from your comments on the duration of primary education, do you think that it is timely for a General Comment by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to address both the school leaving age and a minimum duration of primary level education?

KT: That would require extensive research by both the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Committee on the Rights of the Child. On the global level we have a complete muddle. With global education strategists in the 1990's having introduced the concept of "basic" education, instead of primary or elementary education, this has created a problem because there is no common definition of what is "basic". Is it longer than primary education or shorter? To respect state sovereignty, as it said in global education strategies, each country defines the duration of primary education, meaning that it can be as short as two years in Myanmar, three years in Angola, which is insufficient. So if the Committees were to define the necessary duration of education they would have to fall back on human rights law. We don't talk that much in human rights about elementary or primary or basic education. We insist that education should be compulsory, and that it should last until children reach the minimum age of employment. So there we have very clear criteria in human rights. The minimum recommended age for employment is sixteen. The globally accepted minimum is fourteen. This would present the Committees with an important task but one that would need lots of battling, to criticise all governments which have defined their primary or elementary or basic education as two, three or four years, saying it has to be at least until the age of fourteen, better until the age of sixteen.

HRF: Moving to the Commission on Human Rights, you have cited on many occasions the inability of the Commission to establish a human rights mandate on education as the basis of your request that your mandate not be renewed. Yet in the introduction to your report you state that, as your formal complaint to the OHCHR did not trigger any response, thus you recommended that the mandate not be renewed.

KT: The two issues can't be separated from each other. They are so closely intertwined that one can't segregate them. When the mandate on the right to education started, it did not start as a right to education, it started as one component of this very long resolution on economic, social and cultural rights including obstacles and difficulties faced by developing countries etc. When it started, I insisted that it should be defined as a human rights mandate. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights subsumed it under what they call an economic mandate, so it is bundled under the banner of development. It is not treated as a human rights issue. It demonstrates a similarity between what the Commission does and what the OHCHR implements. It is indeed not a human rights mandate. If you read the resolution you will see that the term 'human rights' is mentioned only twice, and that's in quotes. So there is nothing which would define what a human rights mandate in education actually should be. I've lasted five years stating that gradually I should create conditions, draw the Commission's attention to priorities and the Commission would start altering its resolution. It hasn't started as yet. The complaint against the OHCHR has been now met by the silence of the whole secretariat of the United Nations for no less than five months, which means that there is again a close link between the two. The Office does not feel any pressure to do proper human rights work because the Commission itself has not defined this mandate as requiring proper human rights work!

HRF: Could you explain what you believe to be the basis of the Commission's inability to provide for a human rights mandate in education? Where can it go from here? Is there any hope, for instance, that the Commission would prioritise the protection of teachers in their work, or that it might address the problems of statistical invisibility?

KT: What I see as the problem is two-layered. Human rights mandates started because of wellargued, forceful, well-coordinated NGO campaigns. If we left human rights to governments, to the UN Commission on Human Rights, we would have never have accomplished anything. So I see the background for the Commission's lack of a much more assertive profiling of the right to education as the reflection of the absence of a strong vocal NGO community, which has created thematic mechanisms against torture or summary executions or freedom of expression. That does not exist for the right to education. You will not see teachers' trade unions coming to the Commission on Human Rights. They can't seek protection here because the Commission does not even mention the rights of teachers. They will go to the International Labour Organisation, which will protect them by the special procedure for freedom of association. So there you have a catch- 22 situation - that still the vast majority of NGOs deal with specific civil and political rights issues or geographically isolated human rights problems. If you were to scrutinise NGO produced documentation to see what the NGOs have submitted to the Commission as a platform for what NGOs demand on the right to education, you will find nothing. This means that what is necessary here is the same growth of the human rights movement which we saw around freedom of expression or equal rights for women - good documents, sensible strategies, and then well coordinated lobbying to get government delegations to move, but NGOs have to take the initiative. It is obviously not a job of diplomats to do human rights research, and to draw up alternative platforms.

HRF: On a more particular note, you were unhappy with the translation of your report on the mission to Colombia. How did this come about?

KT: Unhappy is an understatement. I wrote my report in Spanish because I wanted to be able to directly communicate with government officials, with victims, and to be able to present my report and to defend it in the language of the country. Fortunately, I am a Spanish speaker so it wasn't difficult. Knowing that the majority of the people at the Commission do not speak Spanish, people rely on the English translation so I insisted on getting an English translation just to be able to check the accuracy, and the report is completely inaccurate. The very Executive Summary, when I make an important point that the government of Colombia should affirm that its international human rights obligations are legally binding - which the government doesn't do, it only invokes the Colombian constitution - that was turned in English "translation" into the opposite, that the government should affirm that international human rights obligations are being applied in the country. So it's the opposite of what I have stated. It's not inaccurate, it's a distortion of the report to turn my statement around.

HRF: Is this a unique occurrence?

KT: This has happened on very many occasions. Not a single report of mine has been processed by the editorial and translation service without at least one or two phone calls from the OHCHR asking me to delete one or two sentences, one or two points, because they were too critical of individual governments. So that is standard procedure.

HRF: To finish, you stated in your report that you had sent six letters to the Turkish government and received no reply, yet at the Commission the Turkish delegate stated that they had sent three replies to you through the OHCHR. Has there been any explanation?

KT: Yes, there is an explanation. I sent six letters to the Turkish government subsequent to that exchange of correspondence with the Turkish ambassador. And even that exchange of correspondence that he referred to were not letters addressed to me but to the Commission on Human Rights, and which did not enter into the substantive points that I was raising but rather accused me of operating outside my mandate, because for Turkey, as with any country, I had inquired into crucial issues. One of the issues which I always investigate is the balance between military expenditure and investment in education. In Turkey, as in China, as in Colombia, there is clear preference for military expenditure over investment in education. The government of Turkey has consistently held that this is outside my mandate. This again is the interpretation that it is not a human rights mandate, it is an education mandate, so I should go to schools and count the teachers and schoolbooks, rather then look at the role of the military in the country's education. One of the issues that I raised also was that Turkey denied me a meeting with the Higher Education Council, where the armed forces of the country are directly represented, and which govern Turkey's higher education, which means the military have a formal seat in a decision-making body which creates the policy for Turkish universities. And the government again claimed that it was outside my mandate, that I should only look at primary education.

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