A/HRC/29/30 organizations. In the address he gave during the closing ceremony, he focused on the right to education. 27. On 16 December, he addressed the issue of quality education at the 2014 International Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations, which was devoted to the post-2015 development agenda and was hosted by UNESCO in Paris. 28. From 9 to 11 January 2015, he co-chaired a plenary session on the implementation of international law held in the context of the World Congress on International Law. The session was organized by the Indian Society of International Law in New Delhi. 29. On 15 January, he was a lead speaker at an event in New Delhi organized by the Right to Education Forum in cooperation with UNESCO in connection with his 2014 report to the General Assembly. 30. On 23 February, he spoke at the opening session of the World Assembly of the Global Campaign for Education, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, at which he underlined the need to safeguard education against the forces of privatization. Participants in the World Assembly aligned themselves fully with the recommendations made in his 2014 report to the General Assembly. 31. On 18 March, he participated in a round table on the theme “Privatization, education and social justice”, held at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris to examine issues in privatization in education. He also gave a public lecture entitled “Privatization in education: a new challenge for human rights in developing countries”. 32. On 20 March, he was a panellist in an event on the implementation of economic and social rights and State obligations under human rights conventions organized by the Permanent Mission of Fiji to the United Nations Office at Geneva, and spoke on challenges of effective realization of the right to education and its interface with right to development. 33. On 26 March, he gave a keynote address focusing on preserving education as a public good in the face of privatization at a session on the right to quality education and the post-2015 development agenda, organized on the occasion of the World Social Forum in Tunis. 34. On 15 April, he delivered a statement at the opening of the general discussion on the right to education of persons with disabilities, organized in Geneva by the Committee on the Rights of the Persons with Disabilities, with a view to formulating a general comment on article 24 (right to education) of the Convention on the Rights of the Persons with Disabilities. 35. On 22 April, he gave a lecture at Cornell Law School on the negative effects of privatization in education, highlighting State obligations and the need to preserve education as a public good. III. Commercialization of education and its unfettered proliferation 36. A recent in-depth study on privatization has shown that education as a sector is increasingly being opened up to profit-making and trade, and to agenda-setting by private, commercial interests that conceptualize the learner as a consumer and education as a 5