The Protection Of The Right To Education By International Law

In view of the trend of demoting education from "human right" to "human need", this book seeks to affirm education as a "human right" and to describe the various state duties flowing from the right to education, by systematically analyzing article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

12. Parental educational rights

International Law on the Aims of Education is a practical and tangible guide to the international legal standards on the aim and content of education. Using Article 29 of The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) as a reference point, the book provides a detailed legal analysis of international minimum standards on how a child should be educated. The book adopts a traditional legal positivist approach to explore the scope and nature of international law on the aims of education. It is divided into three main questions: 1) What is international law and are the aims of education valid legal obligations? 2) What is the content and scope of these laws on the aims of education? 3) What are the obligations of authorities and teachers to respect and fulfil the law? The book is unique as the first book on international law dedicated separately to the aims of primary and secondary school education, not only focusing on human rights education. This book will be of great interest for teacher students, scholars and post graduate students in the field of education. It will also appeal to legal scholars as well as policymakers.

This book describes how human rights safeguards should be applied in education. Its point of departure is the fact that education can - and does - violate human rights, notably when it is imposed upon the indigenous or minorities so as to obliterate their identity. Human rights are defined as safeguards against abuse of power, whose counterpart are governmental human rights obligations. These are to make education available, accessible, acceptable and adaptable, hence the 4-A scheme. The purpose of human rights work is to expose and oppose abuses of power. They can be detected in the very design of education strategies. Defining availability of primary education as a development target, removed into distant future, negates the right to education and the corresponding governmental obligations, individual and collective. The book uses examples from different regions to describe safeguards that are necessary to transform political promises into legal obligations. Where education is available, access may be conditioned by purchasing power rather than defined as a human right. Denials of the right to education include discriminat!ionagainst non-citizens or girls. They demonstrate the crucial import of human rights, the need to differentiate between poverty- and policy-based exclusion from education. Acceptability of education entails ensuring that education does not violate human rights and is worthy of its name. Typical human rights cases have challenged, in all corners of the world, the language of instruction, censorship of textbooks or harassment of teachers for introducing human rights education. Also, human rights challenges are epitomized in the requirement to adapt education to the learners, to recognize them as subjects of rights. On the micro-level, adapting education to children with disabilities has triggered human rights challenges world-wide. On the macro-level, adaptability tackles the very design of education. Graduate unemployment illustrates shortcomings of treating education as a self-contained sector as do choices between public and private, secular and religious, segregated andall-inclusive education. The book is published by Wolf Legal Publishers, jointly with the European Association for Education Law and Policy. Katarina Tomasevski was Professor of International Law and International Relations at Lund University (Sweden) and, from 1998-2004, she was Special Rapporteur on the right to education of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The book draws on her experience in carrying out country mission!s incountries as different as the People's Republic of China and United States of America, and facilitating redress for human rights violations in education world-wide. http: //www.tomasevski.net

Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in the scale and importance of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESC rights), culminating in the adoption of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in December 2008. The Protocol gives individuals and groups the ability to bring complaints about rights violations before the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Against this background, this book focuses on the question of how fundamental socio-economic human rights enshrined in international law are defined, interpreted, understood, and implemented. It assesses how effective efforts to realize ESC rights have been and investigates the contemporary challenges obstructing their protection. It sets out the impact of the global financial crisis and austerity measures, the human rights responsibilities of corporations, and trends in the justiciability of those rights at the national and international level. The interrelationship between ESC rights and other legal regimes such as trade and investment law, environmental law, international criminal law, and international humanitarian law is also thoroughly examined. After an introduction by the editors the book contains seventeen chapters looking at the main questions which shape the progressive realization of ESC rights and their monitoring mechanisms. The authors of the chapters, both scholars and practitioners, adopt interdisciplinary approaches that move beyond traditional analyses of ESC rights. In doing so, they clarify and illuminate multiple aspects of the law by bringing together the different aspects of ESC rights, restating the challenges they face, and assessing the progress that has been made in expanding their adoption.

Thousands of children from minority and disadvantaged groups will never cross the threshold of a classroom. What can human rights contribute to the struggle to ensure that every learner is able to access high quality education? This brilliant interdisciplinary collection explores how a human rights perspective offers new insights and tools into the current obstacles to education. It examines the role of private actors, the need to hold states to account for the quality of education, how to strike a balance between religion, culture and education, the innovative responses needed to guarantee girls’ right to education and the role of courts. This unique book draws together contributors who have been deeply involved in this field from both developing and developed countries which enriches the understanding and remedial approaches to tackle current obstacles to universal education.

Fundamental rights for all people with disabilities, education and employment are key for the inclusion of people with autism. They play as facilitators for the social inclusion of persons with autism and as multipliers for their enjoyment of other fundamental rights. After outlining the international and European dimensions of the legal protection of the rights to education and employment of people with autism, the book provides an in-depth analysis of domestic legislative, judicial and administrative practice of the EU Member States in these fields. Each chapter identifies the good practices on inclusive education and employment of people with autism consistent with principles and obligations enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Articles 24 and 27). The book contains the scientific results of the European Project “Promoting equal rights of people with autism in the field of employment and education” aimed at supporting the implementation of the UN Convention in the fields of inclusive education and employment.