From convention to classroom: the long road to human rights education

© 2008 Paula GerberA core function of the United Nations over the past six decades has been the promotion and protection of human rights. In pursuit of this goal, the UN General Assembly has adopted numerous human rights treaties covering a vast array of rights. Because it has the highest number of ratifications, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CROC), is often lauded as the most successful of all the human rights treaties. Although the breadth and depth of human rights treaties is impressive, the amount of research into their effectiveness is not. Very little scholarship has been undertaken to evaluate the extent to which human rights treaties are being complied with by countries that have ratified them and whether ratification of a human rights treaty has a positive impact on the human rights situation within a State Party’s jurisdiction. The research that has been undertaken has been largely quantitative and limited to studies of compliance with civil and political rights. This thesis builds on this limited scholarship by qualitatively analysing the ‘compliance’ levels of two States, Australia and the United States, with the norm in Article 29(1) of CROC relating to human rights education (HRE). Although the United States has not ratified CROC, it was selected as one of the case studies for this research in order to enable comparison to be made between HRE in a State that has ratified CROC, and a State that has not, thereby shedding light on whether ratification of a human rights treaty makes a difference