The report centres on the assessment of the educational attainments of students and the implementation of the right to education. The Special Rapporteur on the right to education underlines the importance of developing and applying national assessment systems which are in compliance with international human right norms, so that education meets the essential objectives assigned to it in human rights conventions. He considers that such a human rights-based, holistic approach is essential for fostering the humanistic mission of education rather than its mere instrumental role, using a narrow scope of assessments linked to mathematical literacy and language skills only. The report also places emphasis on skills development as an integral part of basic education and on the need for innovative assessment modalities of technical and vocational education and training, particularly in developing countries, in response to the rising aspirations of youth, while not losing sight of the human rights perspective.
The report concludes with recommendations to strengthen human rights-based, holistic approaches to national assessments of the educational attainments of students.
The present report focuses on girls’ right to education. In view of the first assessment of the Millennium Development Goals, the Special Rapporteur wished to focus on Goals 2 and 3, on universal primary education and gender equality. The Special Rapporteur addresses the sociocultural context of gender discrimination by defining the concept of patriarchalism, which underpins discriminatory behaviours. He denounces the negative impact on education, and especially on girls’ education, of the persistent consideration of education as being a service rather than a human right and insists on the importance of ensuring not only girls’ access to school but also their completion of the education cycle. The report identifies obstacles to education for girls, such as early marriages and pregnancies, child labour (especially domestic work) and armed conflicts.
The Special Rapporteur draws attention to aggravating factors and highlights the key role of human rights education and its concrete implementation at the classroom level to combat gender discrimination and stereotypes. The report also summarises replies received to the questionnaire sent to different stakeholders to solicit information on the realization of the right to education for girls, extracting major trends from the replies and validating his findings. The report provides a set of recommendations based on the four elements identified as components of the right to education, namely, availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability.
In this report submitted to the UN General Assembly , the Special Rapporteur on the right to education examines State responsibility in the face of the explosive growth of private education providers, from a right to education perspective. He emphasizes the need to preserve education as a public good, which must not be reduced to a profit-making business. He also underlines the importance of the principles of non-discrimination and equality of opportunity, as well as social justice and equity. States must develop a regulatory framework for all private providers of education, including sanctions for abusive practices. The Special Rapporteur highlights some additional key issues and concludes with recommendations.
The aim of this report is to provide practitioners and policy-makers in both transitional justice and education with conceptual clarity and practical guidance for developing synergies between their respective fields in responding to past human rights violations. Drawing from a comparative approach that examines different experiences throughout the world, this report does not offer a blueprint for addressing past injustices through education, but, rather, considerations that should be taken into account when framing policy that is based on the particularities of a given context.
The report looks at how a transitional justice framework can play an important role in identifying educational deficits related to the logic of past conflict and repression and informing the reconstruction of the education sector. It also looks at how formal and informal education can facilitate and sustain the work of transitional justice measures.
Section I, which sets out the report’s framework, offers a discussion of what it means to consider transitional justice and education as separate but related elements of societal responses to injustices associated with massive human rights violations, and the contribution that synergies between the two fields can make to establish sustainable peace and prevent the recurrence of abuses. This section, thus, poses the question of what a transitional justice approach brings to the role of education in peacebuilding.
Section II maps out the different components of education reconstruction in which a transitional justice framework can be expected to make a difference. This includes incorporating lessons from transitional justice processes into educational curricula; increasing access to education through reparations or redress measures; and shaping school culture and governance, pedagogy, teaching tools, and teacher capacity and training.
The next three sections consider a range of political and material challenges that actors are likely to face in trying to link transitional justice and education and discuss some strategic considerations for implementing proposed ideas more effectively and sustainably.
Section III highlights the different actors that can play a role in linking transitional justice and education, including transitional justice bodies, civil society groups, school communities, and government, each of which can be an agent of change or an obstacle.
Section IV examines the more capacity and resource-based constraints that efforts to address the past through education are likely to face.
Section V emphasises the importance of identifying opportunities for change while maintaining realistic expectations for the change that can be achieved.
Section VI distills the findings to a set of guidance points for relevant actors. However, in offering guidance about the kind of change being proposed and potential steps, it is important to remember that policies aimed at addressing past injustice through education are very likely to be contested. The specific context will influence the level of this contestation as well as the usefulness of any recommendations, and so contextual analysis will be a critical first step. The guidance offered here must be considered with regard to each unique context. It cannot be assumed, for example, that all communities will desire full integration of schools or support incorporating a justice agenda into classroom learning. Some types of opposition to such eff orts, we argue, should be challenged, but some may be legitimate and / or unlikely to be overcome. These kinds of tensions between the principles of justice being advocated and the reality in which measures based on those principles may be proposed, designed, and implemented must be kept in mind. That said, the research conducted for this project suggests that a context specific approach to addressing the past through education can make a valuable contribution to peacebuilding.
These guidelines are designed to be of use to all who are concerned with understanding and determining violations of economic, social and cultural rights and in providing remedies thereto, in particular monitoring and adjudicating bodies at the national, regional and international levels.
A group of distinguished experts in international law, convened by the International Commission of Jurists, the Faculty of Law of the University of Limburg (Maastricht, the Netherlands) and the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights (University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA), met in Maastricht from 2 to 6 June 1986 to consider the nature and scope of the obligations of States parties to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the considered of States parties' reports by the newly constituted Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and international cooperation under Part IV of the Covenant.
The participants unanimously agreed on what have become known as the Limburg Principles, which they believe reflect the present state of international law. At a meeting on the tenth anniversary of the Limburg Principles, a similar group of experts agreed on the Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Part of a law which allowed the Colombian government to charge for primary education was deemed unconstitutional after a pair of Colombian lawyers, collaborating with the law faculty at New York’s Cornell University and a coalition of civil society organisations, brought a direct challenge against its discriminatory provisions.
In spite of positive developments in the last 60 years, the worldwide promotion and protection of economic and social rights remains a daunting challenge. While millions of people are deprived of clean water, primary health care and basic education, most states do not recognize economic and social rights as more than abstract declarations of principles. Also, governments and international organizations usually tackle these questions exclusively as development challenges, ignoring their relation to human rights obligations. In this article, there is an initial attempt to set out a methodological framework to illustrate how some simple quantitative methods can be used in concrete situations to assess whether a state is violating its human rights obligations. Quantitative tools can help us, as human rights advocates, not only to persuasively show the scope and magnitude of various forms of rights denial, but also in revealing and challenging policy failures that contribute to the perpetuation of those deprivations and inequalities.
This report documents how both Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed militants have carried out indiscriminate or deliberate attacks on schools. Both sides have used schools for military purposes, deploying forces in and near schools, which has turned schools into legitimate military targets. The resulting destruction has forced many children out-of-school and many schools to stop operating or to operate under overcrowded and difficult conditions, Human Rights Watch found.
Human Rights Watch interviewed 62 students, teachers, principals, and witnesses for the report, and visited 41 schools and kindergartens, located both in government-controlled areas and territories controlled by Russia-backed militants.
For further information, see Human Rights Watch's news item on the report.