A/HRC/8/10 page 5 Introduction 1. This report is submitted pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 5/1. 2. Since presenting his last report to the Council and finalizing this one, the Special Rapporteur has undertaken missions to Morocco (November 2006), Malaysia (February 2007) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (October 2007). He has also had working meetings with governments, NGOs, universities, multilateral agencies, United Nations agencies, teachers’ unions, students, groups of children and adolescents and national human rights institutions in nearly every region of the world. 3. The Special Rapporteur has paid particular attention to vulnerable populations and attempted to establish the causes and circumstances surrounding educational exclusion and the challenges that must be faced in order to promote the realization of the right to education. 4. This report shows there is an urgent need to redouble efforts to safeguard educational opportunities for those people - especially children, adolescents and young people - who lose any possibility of going to school because their community has been hit by an emergency situation. 5. For the purposes of this report, “emergencies” are any crisis situations due to natural causes such as earthquake, tsunami, flood or hurricane, or to armed conflict, which may be international (including military occupation) or internal, as defined in international humanitarian law, or post-conflict situations, which impair or violate the right to education, impede its development or hold back its realization. Such situations put people’s health and lives at risk and threaten or destroy public and private assets, limiting the capacity and resources to guarantee rights and uphold social responsibilities. 6. The Special Rapporteur has previously stated1 that half the children who receive no education live in countries where there is or has recently been armed conflict and that, in some of those countries, net school enrolment is below 50 per cent. Recent estimates put the figure at 39 million children.2 7. In addition, recurrent national disasters in impoverished regions can have a multiplier effect, with devastating consequences for school infrastructure, teaching and the educational opportunities generally of the children living in those regions. 8. To assist the Special Rapporteur, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) organized a seminar on “The right to education in emergencies” on 14 and 15 January 2008, to discuss the key concepts for an analysis of the right to education in emergencies and the responsibilities of States and other actors. The seminar also sought to identify gaps in the international community’s regulatory and monitoring arrangements. 1 E/CN.4/2006/45. 2 Alianza Internacional Save the Children, Rewrite the future One year on, 2007, pág. 4.