Accountability from a human rights perspective: The incorporation and enforcement of the right to education in the domestic legal order

GEM report, UNESCO, education, right to education

RTE's background paper for the Global Education Monitoring Report 2017/8: Accountability in education: Meeting our commitments.

The purpose of the paper is to show how a human rights-based approach offers insights and practical solutions to address the accountability deficits found in both education policy decision-making and implementation, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Courts & kids: Pursuing educational equity through the state courts

In describing the state courts’ active new role following the U.S. Supreme Court‘s decision in Rodriguez v. San Antonio Independent School District,1 this chapter emphasised the dramatic change in the outcome of challenges to state education finance systems that occurred beginning in 1989. From that year up until the time of the book‘s publication in 2009, plaintiffs, who had lost over two-thirds of the cases in the preceding decade, prevailed in more than two thirds of the final liability or motion to dismiss decisions of the state's highest courts.

Lifelong learning from a social justice perspective

Over the past two decades, a set of globally converging discourses on lifelong learning (LLL) has emerged around the world. Driven mostly by inter-governmental organisations, these discourses have been largely embraced by national and local education systems seeking to reflect local traditions and priorities. This paper argues that these discourses tend to look remarkably alike, converging into a homogeneous rationale in which the economic dimension of education predominates over other dimensions of learning, and in which adaptation takes pre-eminence

Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - A Commentary

The adoption of the OP-ICESCR is only a beginning and that the real challenges lay ahead. 

This Commentary is intended to benefit claimants and their advocates and to provide a broader resource for states and the Committee – providing a deeper jurisprudential base on the range of issues likely to be raised. In so doing, the Commentary charts in effect both the legal opportunities but also the limitations.

The Right to Education: Monitoring Standard-Setting Instruments of UNESCO

Like all human rights, the right to education imposes three levels of obligations on States parties: the obligations to respect, protect and fulfi ll. In turn, the obligation to fulfi ll incorporates both an obligation to facilitate and an obligation to provide. It is incumbent upon States to incorporate into domestic legal order their obligations under conventions and treaties established by the United Nations and UNESCO and to give effect to these in national policies and programmes.

The Right to Education: an Analysis of UNESCO's Standard-Setting Instruments

This publication comes in response to the Organization’s concern to bring its standard setting instruments into broader use, with the support not only of Member States as prime movers in that effort, but also of international organizations, decision makers, teachers, the intellectual community, and all the stakeholders of civil society. Readers of this publication will gain a better grasp of the standard-setting content of UNESCO’s instruments in the field of the right to education, and this will lend impetus to the international community’s efforts in that regard.

The Right to Education: Scope and Implementation; General Comment 13 on the Right to Education, Article 13 of the ICESCR

"Achieving the right to education for all is one of the biggest challenges of our times. The second International Development Goal addresses this challenge: universalizing primary education in all countries by 2015. This is also one of the main objectives set at the World Education Forum (April 2000), where the right to basic education for all was reaffirmed as a fundamental human right.

Commentary on the Convention against Discrimination in Education

This commentary, written by Professor Yves Daudet and Professor Pierre-Michel Eisemann, eminent professors of the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), constitutes a detailed analysis of the text of the Convention. It highlights the scope—article by article—and the legal obligations of Member States, in referring to the process of preparatory work and debates between governmental experts on the basis of which the Convention was elaborated. This elucidation is imperative for normative action and for a better implementation of this Convention

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