Image: Rohingya children play a game at a school in Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh
Our research forms the basis of ongoing advocacy work to expand access to education for migrants and provides insight into concrete actions that states can take immediately.
Our lawyers analyzed how legal accountability can promote the delivery of education for the millions of school-aged migrants worldwide. The United Nations estimates that 30 million of the approximately 258 million people living outside their country of origin in 2017 are school-aged. We teamed up with the Right to Education Initiative (RTE), which promotes education as a human right, to carry out an extensive review and analysis of national laws, policies and case law in ten countries on the education rights of migrants, internal migrants and refugees.
In total, 18 lawyers and legal staff in 11 offices around the world, led by London partner Rebecca Campbell, and project-managed by Hamburg associate Carola Boeckmann, completed the work in record time. As well as providing the lean RTE team with more hands on deck, we also brought our language skills, our ability to access and review obscure or unclear source material, and the breadth of our legal experience to the table.
“As project manager for this matter, I got to see that we are truly a global law firm and that we work together so well,” said Carola.
Our research spotlights best practice, gaps in legislation and where legislation is in place but is not implemented effectively. It forms the basis of ongoing advocacy work by RTE and its network to expand access to education for migrants and provides insight into concrete actions that states can take immediately.
For instance, our research and analysis were included in an RTE background paper, The status of the right to education of migrants: International legal framework, remaining barriers at national level and good examples of states’ implementation, that was cited in UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report 2019: Migration, Displacement, and Education – Building Bridges, not Walls, published in November 2018. It was also cited in a subsequent UNESCO paper on the right to education of refugees, produced in December 2018 for an International Expert Meeting organized by UNESCO and the regional government of Cataluña.
During this meeting, RTE presented the paper Examples of concrete and promising measures taken by states to ensure inclusion of refugee populations in national systems.
A report from the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education also includes country examples from our research.
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