Education (Right to)

Primary tabs

This public interest litigation case was a response to the fire that swept through Lord Krishna Middle School in the Kumbakonam District.  Lord Krishna Middle School was private school with approximately 900 students.  A fire started in the kitchen nearby that eventually caught the thatched roof of the school building, which fell and killed 93 children inside.  When the firefighters arrived on scene, they noted that the school was severely out of code.  Municipal building codes required the school to be certified every two years, but Lord Krishna Middle School was three years delinquent and

In early 2016, the Acting Superintendent-General issued a circular that demanded learners present their birth certificates to the school administration. Learners unable to submit their birth certificates would no longer receive funding. This had to effect of forcing schools to exclude undocumented children or to allow them to remain while forcing schools to spread already scarce resources. Although the circular demanded birth certificates, in practice schools also excluded non-national children where they were unable to present permits which allowed them to reside in the country.

The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and the European Council for Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) alleged that migrant children in Greece and on the Greek islands have been deprived of their rights that are guaranteed within the Revised European Social Charter (hereinafter “the Charter”). These include the rights to housing compatible with human dignity; social, legal, and economic protections; health; social and medical assistance; and education.

In this case, the right of a student with an intellectual disability to obtain an official diploma attesting to the completion of his secondary school education on an equal basis was challenged in accordance with article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which recognizes the right to inclusive education and prohibits any form of discrimination based on disability.

In 2014 and 2015, an outbreak of Ebola in Sierra Leone forced schools to close for nine months. One consequence of the closures was a significant spike in pregnancies among teenage girls (in some areas, rates went up 65%). As a result, the then-Minister of Education, Science and Technology publicly stated that pregnant girls would not be able to attend mainstream schools while they were pregnant in order to avoid adversely influencing their peers.

The issue in this case was whether the Minister of Education and eight South African provinces had constitutional and statutory duties to provide daily NSNP meals to learners. The plaintiffs included Equal Education, a nonprofit legal education advocacy organization and the school governing bodies of both Vhulaudzi Secondary School and Mashao High School.

The Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia (ACIJ), the Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC), the Asociación Síndrome de Down de la República Argentina (ASDRA) and the Red por los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad (REDI) filed a collective action for protection with the aim of having the National State (Ministry of Education - National Directorate for Information and Evaluation of Educational Quality) take the necessary measures to produce sufficient and appropriate information on the educational trajectories of students with disabilities.

High Court of Uganda Finds Discrepancy in Quality between Public, Government Aided and Public Private Partnership Schools, Violates the Right to Education and Equality

Following the introduction of the Universal Secondary Education (USE) program in 2007 by the Government of Uganda, the program was subsequently implemented in public schools, government grant aided schools, private for profit Public Private Partnership (PPP) schools, and private not for profit PPPs. The Government paid UGX 47,000 per student for those enrolled in PPP schools, as opposed to UGX 230,000 per student enrolled in government aided and public schools.

The Drafting Committee of the Human Rights Guiding Principles on private actors in education has launched an online public consultation to request comments on the document capturing various consultations that took place in recent years with hundreds of...