This policy-oriented research paper investigates some of the aspects of the right to education that might require a stronger footing in the international normative framework and potential expansion for the 21st century. Digital education, increasing human mobility, changing demographics, climate change, and expectations of opportunities for learning throughout life are just a few of the areas that are testing the limits of the existing international normative framework. The culmination of a round of open consultation processes, as well as international seminars and events, and research, this paper presents some of the emerging trends, challenges, and norms that have been discussed.
45 civil society organisations receive with concern the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman’s (CAO’s) Compliance Investigation Report into the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) investment in Bridge International Academies (BIA, also known as NewGlobe schools), and acknowledge its grave findings regarding allegations of child sexual abuse at the company’s for-profit chain of schools in Kenya.
The report examines Senegal’s mixed record in addressing the problem in the year since a fire ripped through a Quranic boarding school in Dakar housed in a makeshift shack, killing eight boys. After the fire, President Macky Sall pledged to take immediate action to close schools where boys live in unsafe conditions or are exploited by teachers, who force them to beg and inflict severe punishment when the boys fail to return a set quota of money. While important legislation has advanced, authorities have taken little concrete action to end this abuse. The report informs about the regulation of Quranic school and makes recommendations.
In this general comment, the Committee on the Rights of the Child emphasizes the urgent need to address the adverse effects of environmental degradation, with a special focus on climate change, on the enjoyment of children’s rights, and clarifies the obligations of States to address environmental harm and climate change. The Committee also explains how children’s rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child apply to environmental protection, and confirms that children have a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
The Special Rapporteur proposes to define the right to be safe in education as the right of learners, educators and non-teaching staff to be protected from any violation of their physical, sexual or psychoemotional integrity, as well as from practices that might harm or endanger healthy relationshis within and outside the educational environment and the free expression of identities, in all educational spaces and processes, including digital ones. Safety entails every person being able to enjoy and exercise their human rights in all aspects of education, without discrimination, fear or reprisal