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Statement of the Special Rapporteur on the right to education,
Professor Katarina Tomasevski,

58th session of the Commission on Human Rights
3 April 2002


It gives me particular pleasure to introduce three reports today, my annual report (E/CN.4/2002/60) and the reports on my missions to the United States of America, from 24 September to 10 October 2001 (E/CN.4/2002/60/Add. 1), and Turkey, from 3 to 10 February 2002 (E/CN.4/2002/60/Add. 2). I am grateful to the OHCHR and the Secretariat of the Commission for having ensured that all three reports are available.

Limitations upon speaking time prevent me from actually presenting my reports and discussing numerous issues that merit this Commission’s attention. Fortunately, there will be more time for this tomorrow, during my one-hour lunchtime briefing (from 13:00 to 14:00) in Room XXIII. I shall therefore run through some of the key points that are addressed in all three reports as rapidly as I can.

The easiest avenue for highlighting the most important developments is going four years back, when the Commission established the mandate of the right to education. The keyword was enhancing its visibility. My first report to the Commission emphasized the need to make the right to education visible in two key areas. Firstly, in human rights, by reinforcing the comprehensiveness of education as civil, political, economic, social and cultural right. This has also facilitated redressing the proverbial neglect of economic and social rights. And, secondly, the right to education had to be made visible in education. This was an immense challenge because the perception that there was no difference between the two was widespread. Differentiating between education and the right to education thus constituted my earliest priority.

The Commission’s initiative in focussing on the right to education initially raised in the realm of education an inevitable question: “what can the human rights approach contribute?” Obviously, we never intended to duplicate what was already done in education, our mandates are this Commission’s thematic procedures, and this is the Commission on Human Rights, not on education. We had to prove that the human rights profession had something to contribute to education, that we had (to use a term seldom employed within this Commission) a comparative advantage. It gives me a great deal of joy to report to you today that the misconception equating education and the right to education is being abandoned. The right to education is gaining visibility in the realm of education, the need for human rights input is increasing and opening the way for human rights main-streaming. This process is best described as a three-dimensional chess game:

On the top chessboard, budgetary allocations for education reflect its real (as different from rhetorical) priority from the global to the local level. The key human rights contribution is converting education from discretionary to obligatory budgetary allocation. Human rights obligations are a corrective for budgetary allocations. There are attractive models in countries where free and compulsory education constitutes an enforceable right. At the global level, I am happy to report progress in my dialogue with the World Bank. The principal recommendation in my annual report from last year (E/CN.4/2001/52, paras. 39 and 81) was implemented - the World Bank has carried out an in-house survey of the charging of fees in primary school and our dialogue has now moved from identifying the problem towards solving it. There is a long way to go but all of us working in human rights are incurable optimists. Prospects for eliminating financial obstacles to access to education have improved with the recently increased commitments to development finance. We have learned, however, that human rights guarantees do not emerge spontaneously. Main-streaming the right to education at the global level today is much more difficult than it was in the past because education is not only a free public service, but also a freely traded service. All of us have witnessed the vicious circle of lower budgetary allocations, leading to deteriorating public education, and the consequent exodus to private schools and universities by those who can afford it. Human rights have proved to be the key to halting and reversing that trend. I have therefore emphasized in my annual report (E/CN.4/2002/60, para. 20) my plea to this Commission to address the tension between progressive liberalization of trade in education services and progressive realization of the right to education.

On the middle chessboard, education strategies, laws, policies and associated statistics determine what education should look like - who should be educated, by whom, how, and for what. The shift to rights-based education makes exclusion from education visible. Education statistics often do not capture discriminatory exclusions, and the human rights input is urgently needed. Our focus on the elimination of discrimination enables us to highlight the changes that are needed to adjust education to the human rights requirements. All my reports constantly reveal the need to create rights-based education statistics, in all countries as well as at the global level. This will constitute a key challenge for main-streaming human rights.

The bottom chessboard is the realm of the people. The education sector is, for the most part, people. Turkey is an example (E/CN.4/2002/60/Add. 2, para. 26) of one of the many countries where more than one-quarter of the population consists of students and teachers. They are not numbers but people endowed with human rights. Fully integrating all their rights in the parallel processes of teaching and learning is an on-going process, worldwide. It is informed by a finding from sociology of education whereby education is, alongside law enforcement, one of the two principal agencies of social control. Design of the curriculum and decisions on the contents of textbooks often create intense political controversy and, again, all my reports reveal that this is a worldwide problem. (E/CN.4/2002/60, para. 67; E/CN.4/2002/60/Add. 1, paras. 74-76; E/CN.4/2002/60/Add. 2, paras. 18 and 72). A particularly welcome contribution which human rights can make is the avoidance of such controversies by reliance on the rule of law, with the additional benefit of integrating human rights education throughout the processes of teaching and learning.

The complexity of main-streaming human rights becomes clear when one considers all vertical and horizontal linkages on this three-dimensional chessboard which, by necessity, I have to capture in my work. There is a need to adjust budgetary allocations for education to the diversity of pupils entering compulsory education, having in mind minority and indigenous children and children with disabilities, as well as the necessity of matching the languages spoken by pupils with those in which teachers can teach. As my mission to the United States has illustrated (E/CN.4/2002/60/Add. 1), the universality of the right to education should entail the universality of corresponding human rights obligations. We do not need a better guide that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which merged the political and economic dimensions of the right to education against the experience of Holocaust, the Second World War and the Great Depression.

The comprehensiveness of the right to education enables us to implement, in practice, indivisibility of human rights. Education is today linked with poverty eradication, and we have a crucially important perspective to contribute. Poverty is often a consequence of the denial of human rights and it cannot be eradicated until the underlying cause is addressed. The motivation for sending girls to school depends on what education is for, what girls can do after schooling. If going to school increases the dowry girls’ parents ought to pay or decreases the bride price, the parents - and the girls - may see it as a burden rather than an asset. If women can own land, get bank loans in their own name, become ministers of defence and directors of central banks, education increase their choices, the enjoyment of all their human rights.

The past year I have been able to initiate an all-encompassing survey of the right to education in the practice of states. I am grateful for the responses by 27 governments and appeal to others to respond as well, confirming my willingness to do whatever I can to facilitate this process. The issue for which I need this Commission’s decisiveness are country missions. For the first time in four years, my request for a country mission has recently been rejected by the Government of Ethiopia. I have not been alone, requests by other Special Rapporteurs have also been rejected. This was the only time I have faced a rejection. On the other hand, and I am glad to be able to thank the Government of Indonesia for its cooperativeness regarding my forthcoming visit to Indonesia. As we are the Commission’s thematic mechanisms, we rely on the Commission to enable us to do what this Commission has asked us to do. Our Chairman was, two years ago, closely involved in my efforts as the then Chairperson of Special Rapporteurs to bring to the attention of the Commission the need to resolutely halt and reverse non-cooperation with its thematic procedures. We were successful then, and I am convinced that we shall be even more successful today.