Sheikha Mozah Calls Education a Right for All Children

The wife of the Qatari Emir, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned, gave a rousing speech at the UNESCO General Conference in Paris on Wednesday. She called for all children, everywhere in the world, to be granted the right to be educated.

Maher Attar/Gulf Times

“Depriving education is equal to depriving right to live,” she said. “The right to education is facing a structural crisis- the repercussions of which might not be revealed in the same way as the repercussions of the financial or the environmental crisis- but which in a long run might well be stronger and more dangerous. This is because quality education prepares the child, the teenager and the young man to face life, armed with the necessary knowledge, experience and skills which allow him to adapt to all the changes and pressures regardless of their causes. This is the type of education which enables us to face the challenges of the millennium.

“75 million children are deprived of the right to education, and 150 million children, 65 percent of whom are female, will not be able to complete their primary education.”

“Aren’t these people suffering from the injustice exercised by the international community, from discrimination and from the violation of the sacred right to education?” asked the Sheikha. “We should all question our ethical, legal and human credibility regarding the right to education if, whenever the sanctity of the educational system is violated by any party willfully and with premeditation, we fail to take the required, firm and appropriate action,”

Sheikha Mozah also called for peace studies to be included in classrooms all over the world.

Mozah, who is UNESCO’s Special Envoy for Basic and Higher Education, was also awarded the gold Victor Hugo medal for her work. It was given to her by the out-going UNESCO chairman, Koichira Maatsura, whom the Sheikha praised for doing “a wonderful job.”