Education in Emergencies & Conflict

In this report, submitted pursuant to General Assembly resolution 48/141, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights considers the protection of economic, social and cultural rights in situations of armed conflict, with a specific focus on the rights to health and to education.

This report documents how violence, threats and intimidation carried out by parties to the conflict in Afghanisatn directly harmed or impacted health and education personnel, reduced the availability of healthcare,and limited children’s access to essential health and education services. Schools and hospitals were damaged or destroyed by targeted attacks and crossfire, with many remaining closed due to insecurity, threats or military use.

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.

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 conflict has had a brutal impact on education in Yemen; 34% of children in the country have not gone to school since the conflict began in March 2015. As of October 2015 1.8 million children were not in school. In some cases parents and children are deterred from going to school because of fear of airstrikes, while in others, schools have been rendered unusable due to the conflict either because they have been damaged or destroyed.

This important new report documents the major obstacles that prevent Syrian refugee children from getting formal education in Turkey, which is hosting more than 2 million refugees from the Syrian conflict that began in 2011. The government adopted an important policy in September 2014 that formally grants Syrian children access to public schools, but key obstacles including a language barrier, social integration issues, economic hardship, and lack of information about the policy, remain one year later.

This report begins by examining some of the explicit and implicit causes of attacks on girls’ education during peacetime and in situations of crisis, including settings of armed conflict, political instability and widespread criminal violence.

The report, Education Denied: Israel’s Systematic Violation of Palestinian Children’s Right to Education, was prepared for the July 2011 High-Level Segment of UN-ECOSOC in Geneva, Switzerland and reviews the implementation of the education-related Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of the United Nations Development Agenda in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt).