Watch - The Abidjan Principles on the Right to Education: The Drafters’ Perspective

A panel of members of the drafting team of the Abidjan Principles on The Right to Education discuss the global civil society participatory drafting process and how to embedded the principles in international human rights law.

The Oxford Human Rights Hub in partnership with the Department for Continuing Education and their summer school and Masters’ Programme hosted the panel who reflected on the process of drafting the Abidjan Principles and the remarkable impact they had on international human rights law.   The Principles have now been endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council, and four of the members of the expert drafting committee and one of the group of wider experts were all in Oxford at the same time.

The panel consisted of OxHRH Director Sandra Fredman, Ann Skelton (University of Pretoria and member of the Committee on the Rights of the Child), Magdalena Sepulveda Carmona (UNRISD) and Maria Smirnova (Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights). The event was moderated by Joshua Castellino (Minority Rights Group International).

The Abidjan Principles on the human rights obligations of States to provide public education and to regulate private involvement in education were finalised on 13 February 2019 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire by a panel of 20 experts from 14 countries worldwide. The Abidjan Principles compile and interpret existing human rights law and standards to provide guidance on how to put them into practice, in particular in the context of the rapid expansion of private sector involvement in education. In an ever more complex world, the Abidjan Principles offer robust reference points of enormous value both for States striving to comply with their obligations under the right to education and for those who wish to hold States accountable for doing so.