Making rights to education real for refugees with disabilities
Year
2018
Pages
22
Series
Background paper prepared for the 2019 Global education monitoring report: Migration, displacement and education: building bridges, not walls

This paper begins with an overview of the international law relevant to children with disabilities who have been forced into exile by war or disaster. There follows a more finely calibrated discussion of the rights of these children to education. It is here that we examine in turn relevant provisions in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its attendant Protocol;issues specific to the settlement of refugee children; and, finally, the challenges of the intersecting  ssues that face refugee children with disabilities wishing to access education. The focus on the paper thereafter is our findings and observations in research conducted between 2013 and 2015, across six countries. Our work looked at the identification of disabilities amongst populations of displaced persons and at the situation faced by these people (Crock et al., 2017). Although broad in its focus on disabilities, the situation of children and their access to education and development emerged inevitably as a matter of primary interest and concern. As we explain in Part 4, research destinations were chosen so as to capture the situation facing persons with disabilities in a range of displacement situations. Beginning in our own (ASEAN) region, we chose Indonesia because of its experience as a country of transit for refugees and asylum seekers whose presence in the country has tended to be relatively short-lived, furtive and legally precarious. Malaysia followed as a country that plays host to sizeable cohorts of refugees and irregular migrants from proximate countries (especially Myanmar) as well as from further afield (including Sri Lanka and the Middle East). The paper concludes in Parts 5 and 6 with a discussion of strategies for inclusive education for refugee children with disabilities, drawing on examples of good practice we observed in our fieldwork and making suggestions for future initiatives

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