those issues for which there is global consensus on what constitutes a human rights violation, which problems yield different solutions in interpreting human rights, and also to infer the optimal solutions for rights-based education. • 4 Secondly, many international human rights treaties dealing with economic, social and cultural rights (with the exception of those generated within the International Labour Organization) were written to preclude their domestic and international litigation. The explicit wording of international human rights treaties which were written during the heat of the Cold War, particularly the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,4 constitutes a considerable challenge in necessitating a re-interpretation of economic and social rights adapted to changed circumstances – the imprecision with which governmental obligations have been defined, the corresponding inexactness in definitions of individual rights, the necessity to dissociate governmental human rights obligations from general economic, social or cultural policy, and the systemic nature of problems concerning economic and social rights which casts doubts on the utility of an individual complaint mechanism and points to collective The comments of states that are party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on the Draft Optional Protocol, which is aiming to make economic, social and cultural rights susceptible to individual complaints for violations and adjudication by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights can be found in U.N. Docs. E/CN.4/1998/84, E/CN.4/1998/84/Add. 1, E/ CN.4/1999/112, E/CN.4/1999/112/Add.1, and E/CN.4/2000/49. or public interest complaints or else a policy review mechanism. These two features are obviously and closely linked: domestic legal enforcement of a right is the essential prerequisite for its international enforcement and this text therefore focuses on domestic jurisprudence. Abstract provisions of international human rights treaties or domestic laws tend to be the only guidance available to educationists and they do not really help to infer how specific real-life issues should be addressed. Their interpretation is triggered by the need to apply law to reallife cases and provides useful guidance in clarifying what governments should and should not be doing. Even in countries where education has not been recognized as a right, balancing parental and children’s rights with regard to sex education in school, corporal punishment, governmental regulation of private schools, academic freedom for university professors, and many other issues are being litigated. Court cases are often initiated by individuals who feel that their rights have been violated and demand a remedy. The nature and scope of human rights is then examined through due process of law, whereby substantive issues are defined or clarified. Cases represent bottom-up approach – real-life problems trigger interpretation and application of domestic and international law. Procedural problems and legal technicalities deter non-lawyers and are omitted from this publication. The necessary background will be available at www.right-to-education.org in a user-friendly form. Right to Education Primers No. 3 11