The right to education belongs to the fundamental human rights. Its realisation builds the cornerstone for the exercise of other human rights, such as the right to vote, the right to free speech or the right to work. Nonetheless, more than 260 million children and young people worldwide still lack access to education and 750 million adults remain illiterate (UNESCO, 2018, p. 122). Despite global investments and initiatives such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the inequalities not only in the area of access to education prevail. Diverse factors contribute to the failed goal of education for all, such as gender discrimination, armed conflicts, displacement, poverty or prejudice against persons with disabilities. To make matters even more complex and adverse for the most vulnerable groups, the above mentioned factors often interact creating multiple levels of discrimination and inequality not only in education. Thus, children with disabilities living in poverty face additional barriers when accessing education, as well as female refugees or girls with disabilities.

Even though the right to education is stipulated in all the core international human rights instruments, many of them fail to include specifically children and/or adults with disabilities. It was not until the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) that the right to education for children with disabilities was explicitly included into a binding human rights convention. The crucial importance of this acknowledgment is sadly to be observed until today since persons with disabilities are among the most vulnerable to exclusion from education, having either no access to schooling at all or being segregated from their peers in special institutions outside of the mainstream system (Kanter, 2019, p. 15).

With the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the right to inclusive education became legally binding. Robust research on this topic is available in the fields of disability studies and education, however, within the area of international human rights law, the concept has attracted growing attention only recently. Furthermore, the topic of intersectionality remains scarcely connected to the right to inclusive education despite the theory’s potential to interpret the right across the whole range of human rights treaties and thus in a truly inclusive way. The aim of the talk is thus to analyse the established right to inclusive education through the intersectional lens and to discuss the extent of the protection international human rights law provides in the area of the right to inclusive education in situations when multiple dimensions of vulnerability meet, with special focun on displaced persons with disabilities.

In order to reach the aim described above, the talk first elaborates on the concepts of inclusive education, vulnerability and intersectional discrimination. Secondly, relying on the idea that persons with disabilities are best protected when the CRPD is viewed together with the protections guaranteed by the remaining human rights instruments, and taking intersectionality into consideration, the proposal aims to assess the content and the scope of the protection offered to the marginalised groups in the area of the right to inclusive education under the international human rights law through the content analysis of the work of various UN treaty bodies, namely concluding observations and the jurisprudence of the CRPD Committee supported by the published work of other UN treaty bodies, relevant case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and academic scholarship. Special attention will be paid to the group of displaced persons with disabilities.

The talk examins the right to inclusive education through the intersectional lens and concludes that particularly persons with disabilities belonging to ethnic minorities and displaced persons with disabilities do not enjoy the same level of protection in the area of inclusive education under the international human rights law compared with other vulnerable groups. They remain largely invisible not only in practice, but sadly also on the level of international human rights law and in the work of the CRPD Committee regarding the right to inclusive education. Through the elevated embrace of intersectionality invisible cases of human rights violations of the most vulnerable groups could be brought to light and the oppression might be directly addressed. This approach then may, indeed, lead to tackling the oppression of groups of persons belonging simultaneously to multiple vulnerable groups and to their stronger protection under the international human rights law. Through encouraging the States Parties to apply the intersectional lens in the reporting process, by acknowledging that specific forms of oppression and exclusion take place when multiple forms of vulnerability intersect and by bridging the individual human rights treaties, a truly inclusive approach to the protection of human rights might be established. Considering the specific example of the right to inclusive education, this perspective could contribute to addressing not only the individual experiences of disrespect, exclusion and the lack of support in education, but also to highlight the broader system failures. Furthermore, the intersectional point of view has the potential to promote the concept of inclusive education by emphasizing the importance of education for ‘all’ where no groups and individuals are left behind and the forgotten ones are given voice.

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