Another aspect of discrimination on education is confining children to an inferior standard of education. And we have documented this in schools that are separate but unequal, which is the situation of Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel in Israeli schools...that Israel runs two separate school systems, one for Jewish children and one for Palestinian-Arab citizen children. And we found that in every respect, Palestinian-Arab children receive an inferior education and that they have higher dropout rates and performance rates. Another example is tracking...and this has been very well documented by the European Roma Rights Center, which found that Roma kids, for example in the Czech Republic, were fifteen times more likely to be placed in remedial education than were other children in the population. And finally, an inferior form of education can be found for children in detention, and Human Rights Watch has documented, for example, in the case of Pakistan, that prisons almost uniformly did not provide education to juvenile wards, with the exception of a few institutions. And in Kenya, that some juvenile institutions provided no secondary education, or provided secondary education only to boys. And in the United States, where we did investigations in Maryland and the state of Louisiana, and found that children had inferior or no access to education.
The right to education is important on several grounds as you can see in these different examples. It is important because when the right to education is denied, children are not able to access other rights that enshrined both in the Convention on The Rights of the Child and other international law conventions. But, at the same time, when children's rights are violated, those affect the right to education. So it works both ways. And I think that's something that we have found as we have worked more on the right to education, that when we work on violations of children's rights, these touch on education in both ways, which makes it incredible important. At the UN special session next week, education is one the issues that will be debated by the heads of states. And I hope that some of these issues that relate to discrimination will be part of that discussion, and something that governments find important to address. Thank you.
Thank you very much. I think you've touched on a very very important issue for the future of children. Education is what provides autonomy, the right to make other decisions and the right to everything else in life. So I hope that the convention will look at this. Thank you all the speakers and the children and thank you all the participants. I think it has been a very interesting evening. And you still have opportunities to ask more questions and debate with Hari Acharya during the reception.