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Substantive equality of refugee children in education acts of Finland and Norway
Refugee children in Education Acts of Finland and Norway Mariya Riekkinen and Natallia Bahdanovich Hanssen
M. Riekkinen and N. Bahdanovich Hanssen 1 Introduction
1.1 Refugee children’s right to education
The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (the UN Refugee Convention) proclaimed that access to primary education is the basic minimum standard for the treatment of refugees. Art.22 of this Convention guarantees that refugees should be accorded “the same treatment as is accorded to nationals concerning elementary education”. Granting all children, the right to education was later established as a human right by the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC). UN CRC obligates states to recognize the right to compulsory education which “should be achieved based on equality of opportunity” (Art.28). The rights set forth by the UN CRC belong to every child, irrespectively of status (Art.2). Thus, states should respect the equality principle in education, taking active measures to counteract discrimination and “guarantee substantive equality” (Verheyde 2006). Substantive equality of refugee children in education is especially relevant in the light of the scientific debate on education rights as an extension of national social rights, initiating the discourse on ‘otherness’ (Benhabib 2004) where exclusion of ‘others’ “is crucial for concrete personhood and citizenship” (Migliarini 2018, pp. 52).
The problem of achieving substantive equality for refugee children in education is a part of a greater issue of implementing the right to education nationally (ibid.). On the one hand, the UN CRC had shifted the entitlements of refugee children to education “from humanitarian intervention to a human right” (ibid, pp. 53). On the other hand, research shows that the refugee children are treated as refugees first and children second (Arnot et al. 2013; Pinson et al. 2010). This highlights the urgency of approaching the education of refugee children from the perspective of educational equality and the role of the states in the latter (Pinson and Arnot 2007).
