The week in children's rights - 1549

At least 21 students and two teachers died last week in a fire at a religious school in Malaysia, the latest in a string of similar incidents which have raised concerns about safety measures in the country’s unregulated education sector. The fire broke early in the morning and the victims are thought to have been trapped in their dormitory as the windows were covered with metal grilles. Local media reports that the school could have been operating against government regulations, because its fire safety permit application was allegedly still pending. The students, all boys between the ages of 13 and 17 years old, are believed to have died while trying to escape, with reports indicating that the entire upper floor of their school was gutted by the blaze. Malaysia's urban well-being and housing minister said there had been 29 fire incidents at similar religious schools in the country since 2015. On top of concerns about fire safety, an 11-year-old schoolboy died in hospital earlier this year after reportedly being beaten by a warden at a religious school.

Students and teachers are reported to be taking part in this year’s cotton harvest in Turkmenistan, despite the government’s recent approval of a law supposedly regulating the industry. Many government workers, including doctors, teachers and civil servants, are forced to pick cotton for the government each year, with threats of unemployment or violence reported by those who have tried to resist the state-imposed forced labour. Many schools close during the harvest, and children are often brought to the fields along with adults. As in previous years, international observers have recorded young people stepping onto buses bound for cotton fields rather than schools this season. It was previously reported that 545,000 hectares have been allocated for cotton farming in Turkmenistan this year, from which it is estimated that more than a million tonnes of cotton will be harvested.

School segregation has been criticised by the Council of Europe’s High Commissioner for Human Rights for its negative impact on minority students and for the damage it does to national education systems as a whole. In his new report on the topic, Nils Muižnieks notes that many European countries continue to deny thousands of children, including children with disabilities, Roma children and refugee or migrant children, equal access to education by keeping them in segregated schools. Muižnieks noted that a lack of awareness about the importance of inclusive education was one of the main barriers to progress, and recommended governments launch campaigns to raise awareness of the dangers of school segregation, while stressing the benefits of inclusive education. “This is not a utopian project, but an achievable goal that can ensure more equal treatment of all children and, in the long term, improve social cohesion”, noted the Commissioner. The report sets out 12 recommendations to develop more inclusive education policies, particularly through improved anti-discrimination laws, school desegregation strategies, and better regulation of school admissions.

More than half of the 400,000 Rohingya Muslims who have entered Bangladesh from Myanmar are children, UNICEF reported last week, yet by the end of the year an estimated 600,000 children are expected to have crossed the border. The UN’s top human rights official, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, accused Myanmar last week of carrying out “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” against Rohingya Muslims, after receiving consistent reports of widespread extrajudicial killings, rape and other violations. With the influx of refugees, including over 1,100 unaccompanied children, the Bangladeshi border camps have been overwhelmed and are ill-equipped to provide shelter, food or clean water. Consequently, new settlements are expected to be built in the next week and will include 14,000 new shelters. In the meantime, aid groups working in the border camps have begun a vaccination programme against the threat of measles, rubella and polio for children below the age of 15.

More than 75 percent of migrant and refugee children trying to reach Europe through the Mediterranean face appalling levels of abuse, exploitation and trafficking, according to a new report. Some 22,000 migrants and refugees, including some 11,000 children and young people, were interviewed for the UNICEF-International Organization for Migration joint report, which highlights how under-25s are at higher risk of abuse than older adults. It notes that children from sub-Saharan Africa are targeted more than any other group, and that those who migrate unaccompanied or have lower levels of education are highly vulnerable to exploitation at the hands of traffickers and criminal groups over the course of their journeys. The two organisations are calling for the creation of safe and regular pathways for migration to avoid migrants and refugees resorting to such dangerous journeys.  

Refugee children are experiencing an education crisis, according to the UN Refugee Agency, with more than 3.5 million aged between five and 17 years old not attending school last year. It reports that only 61 percent of refugee children attend primary school, compared to 91 percent of the world’s children. The agency says the figure drops below 50 percent for refugee children in poor countries, and that far fewer adolescents attend secondary school. In the case of Syrian refugee children, funding appears to be a factor, as millions of dollars pledged by world leaders last year never reached the students and cannot be accounted for, Human Rights Watch has revealed. The missing funding has contributed to around half a million Syrian children being out of school, according to the organisation. It appears that in some cases the funds by donor nations were delivered after the beginning of the school year or were not earmarked specifically for education.