(GCPEA) – On the 25th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA) calls on states to safeguard children’s rights to life and education by addressing widespread attacks on schools, teachers, and students, and military use of education buildings during war. In 1989, world leaders recognized the rights of all children by adopting the CRC, the most widely ratified international human rights treaty in history. Yet, a quarter of a century later, the right to education enshrined in the CRC remains merely aspirational for some of the globe’s most vulnerable girls and boys in some of its most dangerous places: half of the world’s nearly 58 million out-of-school children of primary school age live in conflict-affected states.
