This report aims to present a brief overview of the ongoing privatisation processes in education in Brazil and its negative impacts on the achievement of the human right to education of children and adolescents.

This report, which complements a recent submission to the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) by the Brazilian National Association of Centers for the Defense of Child Rights (ANCED), cites evidence that education privatisation inhibits equity of access and participation, and reduces education to a commodity.

This report finishes by calling upon the Brazilian State to limit the role of the private sector in education, from preschool to higher education, and that the State itself should commit to ensuring the public provision of education through improved financing, regulation and governance enforcement mechanisms.

This present document, produced by the Brazilian Campaign for the Right to Education (Brazilian Campaign) and the NGO Ação Educativa, aims to present a brief overview of the ongoing privatization processes in education in Brazil and its negative impacts on the achievement of the human right to education of children and adolescents, as a contribution to the II Alternative Report on the Situation of the Rights of the Child in Brazil organized by the National Association of Centers for the Defense of Child Rights (Associação Nacional dos Centros de Defesa da Criança e do Adolescente - Anced).

On 12 June 2014, during the June Session of the Human Rights Council, the Portuguese Mission, together with Privatisation in Education Research Initiative (PERI) and the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (GI-ESCR), convened a side-event on privatisation and its impact on the right to education at Palais des Nations in Geneva. In this podcast, Iracema Nascimento dos Santos, from the Brazilian Campaign for the Right to Education shares the Brazilian case.

This paper aims to contribute to the discussions regarding the impacts privatisation process brings to the accomplishment of the right to education, taking the Brazilian reality as a reference.

The paper draws up a brief characterisation of the education provision in Brazil, in order to define the situation of educational services and the presence of private sector in the coverage of basic (early years, elementary and secondary education) and higher education schools. Next, it points out the main areas of privatisation of education in Brazil. At the end, it lists, from the analysis of the national context and researches conducted on this topic, the main tension points between the increasing privatisation process and the enjoyment of the human right to education, with reference to the contents of this right in the terms it was established in the General Comment 13.

La Campaña Latinoamericana por el Derecho a la Educación (CLADE) es una red de organizaciones de la sociedad civil fuertemente comprometida con la plena realización del derecho humano a la educación pública, gratuita, sin discriminación de ningún tipo, con justicia social y ambiental para todas las personas. En ese sentido, hemos venido trabajando, desde hace más de una década, la temática relativa al financiamiento adecuado, con recursos públicos, por el fortalecimiento de la educación pública, cuestionando las tendencias a la privatización y mercantilización en educación. La presente publicación – una continuidad de esos esfuerzos – resulta de una investigación con el propósito de evidenciar si y en qué grado los marcos legales de la región permiten el lucro en la educación en su etapa obligatoria. El estudio incluyó a nueve países de América Latina y el Caribe: Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Haití, Honduras, México, Paraguay y Perú. Nuestro punto de partida y referencial para realizarla es el marco de los derechos humanos y su reafirmación por encima de los intereses económicos.