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Strategic objective E.5.
Provide protection, assistance and training to refugee women, other displaced women in need of international protection and internally displaced women
Actions to be taken
147. By Governments, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations and other institutions involved in providing protection, assistance and training to refugee women, other displaced women in need of international protection and internally displaced women, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Programme, as appropriate:
g. Facilitate the availability of educational materials in the appropriate language – in emergency situations also – in order to minimize disruption of schooling among refugee and displaced children;
Beijing Declaration (1995)
In this section of the Beijing Declaration, we can note the requirements within education, for Paragraph 147 section (g). Among those women and children who have been displaced, internally or externally (refugees), the main issue is the lack of educational resources in war zones or in fleeing from them. The expulsion from the internal society or to beyond the boundaries of the Member State creates some obvious issues for the refugees and the internally displaced persons.
One of which is the lack of access to standard services of the society. These can be medical and other institutional supports. Insofar as the education of the young and the old, education is crucial at young ages. Many children who are displaced for reasons of war or rejection by society can lose out on core educational time. This time can be hard to catch up.
In the cases of months, even years, of lost educational time, based on being a refugee or an internally displaced person, or having no particular formal educational resources, some children may never catch the lost time of education. They will be bereft of education based on a lack of resources and instability in their local environment.
When (g) states the facilitation of access to the educational materials, the focus is production and delivery, probably, to those most affected. Children may not have the appropriate language background based on speaking the tongue of the parents, but now living in another country as a persona non grata. The United Nations isn’t always the most spectacular at the implementation of its programs.
One of those being educational provisions for the Rohingya. If we look at the reportage by Human Rights Watch, it, in “Are We Not Human?” Denial of Education for Rohingya Refugee Children in Bangladesh,” states:
The Bangladesh government’s insistence that the refugees will return to Myanmar has led it to prohibit humanitarian groups from constructing permanent, brick-and-mortar school buildings in the refugee camps. Barred from opening schools, NGOs have since 2017 constructed about 3,000 “learning centers”: small, temporary bamboo structures that can accommodate up to 40 children at a time. Many learning centers “have rotted already and need to be replaced, since the little worms have been doing their work on the bamboo,” as a humanitarian official noted.
Because the lack of space in the crowded camps limits the number of learning centers that can be built, most learning centers operate three daily “shifts,” of just two hours each, in order to reach a larger number of children. Designs for sturdier, two-story bamboo structures, which could accommodate more students using the same amount of land, had not yet been piloted when the 2019 monsoon season began. As of August 2019, only about 1,600 out of 3,000 learning centers had bathrooms or potable water nearby; none that Human Rights Watch visited had electricity, desks or chairs.
The majority of the children in the ‘learning centers’ are 11 years old or under with barely 4 % above the age of 14. Here, we come to the dilemma of the entirely innocent treated as non-persons. In “UN, NGOs accused of bungling effort to educate Rohingya children,” Clare Hammond & Victoria Milko argue on the bungling of the effort to educate the Rohingya children.
This is catastrophic for thousands and thousands of children. I merely ask, “Do we have a responsibility to children?” Those who are brought into the world when their world is completely turned upside down. Who are we to turn them away, for one? Also, for two, who are we to deny them the basic rights afforded to others seen in the neighbouring countries or, at a minimum, connected the infrastructure, the system supports, of the wider society?
Hammond and Milko reported:
Under UN guidelines, refugee children are supposed to be taught either the curriculum of their host country or that of their homeland.
In the Rohingya’s case, the Myanmar government refused to allow its curriculum to be used and in October 2017, two months after a brutal military crackdown had driven hundreds of thousands of majority-Muslim Rohingya from Myanmar into Bangladesh, officials in Dhaka banned the use of its curriculum for the newly-arrived refugee children.
A bespoke curriculum, which has only been partly approved by Bangladesh, was supposed to provide a temporary solution while the UN and its partners worked to convince either the Bangladesh or Myanmar governments to allow their curricula to be used by schools in the camps.
But interviews by Al Jazeera, suggest that for 18 months until May this year, there was limited effort to convince the Myanmar government to allow the use of its curriculum to educate the refugee children, now thought to number about 461,000.
It is a failing situation for hundreds of thousands of children who may enter in an informal categorization mentioned in statements before. Something like lost youth without a place in society and without hope for one because of the inability to regain so much lost educational time. Many will not have a future. They won’t; and, they can’t, through no fault of their own.
In emergency situations such as these, the assistance to children becomes integral for the movement of the dials of justice forward and to provide fundamental human rights to those who deserve them most, children.
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- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Some general declarations (not individual Declaration or set of them but announcement) included the UN Decade for Women (1976-1985).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979) and the Optional Protocol (1999).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and the optional protocol (1993).
- Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), Five-year review of progress (2000), 10-year review in 2005, the 15-year review in 2010, and the 20-year review in 2015.
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000), and the UN Security Council additional resolutions on women, peace and security: 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009), 1889 (2009), 1960 (2010), 2106 (2013), 2122 (2013), 2242 (2015), and 2467 (2019).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
- UN Women’s strategic plan, 2018–2021
Strategic Aims
- 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, emphasis on the entirety of the goals with a strong focus on Goal 5
- 2015 agenda with 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (169 targets for the end to poverty, combatting inequalities, and so on, by 2030). The SDGs were preceded by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from 2000 to 2015.
- The Spotlight Initiative as another important piece of work, as a joint venture between the European Union and the United Nations.
Celebratory Days
- February 6, International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation is observed.
- February 11, International Day of Women and Girls in Science is observed.
- June 19, Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict is observed.
- June 23, is International Widows’ Day is observed.
- October 11, International Day of the Girl Child is observed.
- October 15, International Day of Rural Women is observed.
- November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women is observed.
Guidelines and Campaigns
- Gender Inclusive Guidelines, Toolbox, & United Nations System-wide Strategy on Gender Parity.
- Say No, UNiTE, UNiTE to End Violence against Women, Orange the World: #HearMeToo (2018), and the 16 days of activism.
Women and Men Women’s Rights Campaigners
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Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash