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Applying practice to reality: Assessing the Liberian case against human rights principles

Thu, March 29, 11:30am to 1:00pm, Fiesta Inn Centro Histórico, Floor: Lobby Floor, Room A

Proposal

Different bodies have recalled the applicability and relevance of human rights for the understanding of private actors in education. The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education, Kishore Singh (2014, 2015a, 2015b), dedicated three of his reports on the issue, including one in particular on PPPs (2015b). In 2016 and 2017, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) has adopted resolutions urging all States to “address any negative impacts of the commercialization of education”. The resolutions address explicitly public-private partnerships, as it requires States to put in place “a regulatory framework for education providers, including those operating independently or in partnership with States, guided by international human rights obligations, that establishes, at the appropriate level, inter alia, minimum norms and standards for the creation and operation of educational services, addresses any negative impact of the commercialization of education and strengthens access to appropriate remedies and reparation for victims of violations of the right to education” (UN HRC, 2016, 2017, emphasis added).UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies have also come out with similar findings in their reviews of the human rights situation in specific countries (Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 2017).

If there is thus a clear human rights mandate to regulate and address the role of PPPs, the exact application of human rights standards to public funding of non-state actors need to be laid out in detail for it to be operationalized. Yet, the application of the human rights framework to private actors in education is not straightforward as it protects two dimensions that may conflict: (1) the right to free, quality, compulsory education without discrimination, and (2) the liberty of parents to set up and/or choose for their children non-governmental schools (Aubry & Dorsi, 2016).

To clarify how the human rights framework applies to private actors in education, a group of experts, with the support of various national and international organizations working on the issue, are developing Human Rights Guiding Principles on States’ obligations regarding the delivery of education. The work on these Principles started in early January 2016, and it is hoped that they will be finalized by mid-2018. The aim of these Principles is to unpack and clarify existing human rights law relevant for the understanding of the norms applicable to the engagement of private actors in education, in order to provide a solid and legitimate normative framework.

While these Guiding Principles do not directly address PPPs, they lay out the human rights criteria for the public funding of non-State actors, and provided a basis to identify when such funding violates international law. This presentation will review what the application of the latest draft of these Guiding Principles to PPPs looks like, by taking a particular example. Drawing on the recently evaluated PPP in Liberia (Romero et al., 2017), it will review the available data against the criteria set under international law, and discuss how using these criteria can be used transform reflections on education policies.

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