A/HRC/4/104 page 12 country visits and communications with Governments regarding allegations of human rights violations. This section highlights some of their main activities in this regard. In respect of communications with Governments from November 2005 to November 2006, in cases where communications from special procedures to Governments addressed individuals rather than groups of persons, the total number of cases concerning individual women was 465, constituting 16.6 per cent of all communications concerning individuals. 29. The Special Rapporteur on the right to education has actively raised awareness about obstacles to equal access to education and called for implementation of measures to ensure equality in education. In 2005, he contributed to discussions on progress in girls’ enjoyment of the right to education on the occasion of the target date for attainment of the first phase of Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 3, which seeks to eliminate gender disparity in primary education and is an important milestone towards MDG 2, which sets the objective of universal primary education by 2015. The Special Rapporteur’s report to the sixty-second session of the Commission on Human Rights (E/CN.4/2006/45) on girls’ right to education addresses, inter alia, the sociocultural context of gender discrimination by defining the concept of patriarchalism, which underpins discriminatory behaviours. He denounces the negative impact on education, and especially on girls’ education, of the persistent consideration of education as being a service rather than a human right and insists on the importance of ensuring not only girls’ access to school but also their completion of the education cycle. The report identifies obstacles to education for girls, such as early marriages and pregnancies, child labour (especially domestic work) and armed conflicts. The Special Rapporteur draws attention to aggravating factors and highlights the key role of human rights education and its concrete implementation at the classroom level to combat gender discrimination and stereotypes. The report also reviews the replies to a questionnaire sent to different stakeholders to solicit information on the realization of the right to education for girls, extracting major trends from the replies. Finally, it provides recommendations based on the four elements identified as components of the right to education, namely, availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability. 30. The Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health in his report to the sixty-first session of the General Assembly (see A/61/338) examines, inter alia, the relationship between the right to health and one of the Millennium Development Goals, the reduction of maternal mortality. Properly integrated, the right to health can help ensure that the relevant policies are more equitable, sustainable and robust. The report sets out the norms and obligations relevant to maternal mortality, highlights the positive contribution of the right to health to reducing maternal mortality, and proposes a human rights campaign against maternal mortality. In July 2006, the Special Rapporteur participated in informal consultations organized by UNFPA on current and future work on sexual and reproductive health rights. He noted that two interrelated challenges that he focuses on - discrimination and stigma, and poverty - permit him to examine many sexual and reproductive health rights issues, including maternal mortality, access to sexual and reproductive health-related information and services, and violence against women. Systematic discrimination based on gender impedes women’s access to health and hampers their ability to respond to the consequences of ill-health for themselves and their family. Eliminating discrimination against women in the field of health also means empowering women to make decisions in relation to their sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, violence and discrimination.