Reframing the Right to Education in International Law: A Blueprint for Normative Reform

Amina Mohammed, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General, has recently remarked that education is globally “in crisis.” Changed circumstances since the adoption of the primary international human rights treaties, a multitude of scattered education rights norms, and distinct new challenges require a “reframing” of the right to education in international law. Challenges which have led to a global crisis in education include privatisation, commerciali-sation, and digitisation; in times of globalisation, ignoring the need for human rights to apply “beyond borders” (extraterritoriality); poverty and a(n) (ostensible) lack of resources; Western hegemony in education, inequality, and exclusion; and unsustainable development. All of these phenomena have their ultimate basis in neoliberal ideology. Critiquing neoliberalism, the purpose of this research is to start designing reform proposals for the international right to education through hard and soft law. Such a “rephrasing” must be seen as an act of rescuing the right to education as a global ethical standard in the field of education based on human dignity. Its credibility depends particularly on the extent to which it gives expression to the individual and collective development needs of countries of the global South. Central to the project is the production of a Research Handbook on the Right to Education, addressing “the reformers” at the United Nations.