The Relevance of the Abidjan Principles to understand Public Education and Alternatives to Privatisation

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Strengthening Public Education: Tools and Experiences for aligning Education Policies with the Right to Education

Proposal

On 13 February 2019, human rights and education experts gathered in Côte d’Ivoire unanimously adopted the Abidjan Principles on the human rights obligations of States to provide public education and to regulate private involvement in education. This moment marked the culmination of three years of participatory consultations and signified a landmark development for the right to education. These Principles have been signed by 57 of the most qualified experts from around the world and have quickly gained recognition by international and regional human rights bodies and have become the reference text in the context of non-State actors in education.

The Abidjan Principles provide an updated compilation of standards that address the contemporary challenges in education. They consolidate and reassert the existing obligations of States regarding the right to education, as set out under human rights law and standards and unpack and clarify the normative content of the right to education in the context of the growth of private actors in education.

This presentation will demonstrate how the Abidjan Principles can be used as an analytical framework to evaluate education systems and will model how the content of the Abidjan Principles can enable researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders to think of and develop more coherent policies to strengthen their public education systems. In doing so, it will lay out the differences between terms such as ‘public’ and ‘private’ for the classification of education institutions and analyse the concrete legal implications such considerations may have for implementing the obligation to provide public education in the contemporary context.

Authors

• Sylvain Aubry, Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

• Zsuzsanna Nyitray, Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights