The ill-equipped and ill-housed institutions and substandard staff therein are counter-productive and detrimental to inculcating spirit of inquiry and excellence in the students. The disregard of statutory compliance would amount to letting loose of innocent and unwary children.7 The other facet of the obligation to ensure that schooling is available are safeguards against abuses of power by the government. A government may close a university because professors and students have challenged the official orthodoxy exercising their freedom of expression. Or it may disregard the right to education and breach its obligation to ensure that education is available. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights found in 1996 that a two year long closure of universities and secondary schools in Zaire (as it was at the time) constituted a violation of Article 17 of the Charter, which guarantees the right to education. 8 7 Supreme Court of India – State of Maharashtra v. Vikas Sahebrao Roundale and Others, judgment of 11 August 1992, paras. 2–3 and 12, (1992) 4 Supreme Court Cases 435. 8 African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights – Free Legal Assistance Group, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Union Interafricaine des Droits de l’Homme, Les Témoins de Jehovah v. Zaire, Communications 25/89, 47/90, 56/91 and 100/93 (joined), Decision of the Commission adopted at its 18 th ordinary session at Prais (Cape Verde), Ninth Annual Activity Report of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights 1995/96, Assembly of Heads of State and Government, Thirty-second Ordinary Session, 7–10 July 1996, Yaounde, Cameroon. Legal challenges of un-available education follow the rule of inverse proportion: where education is the least available, its absence is attributed to poverty and there are no legal challenges. The most important reason is that no legal obligation can force the state to make education available if this is beyond its powers; nobody can be legally obliged to do the impossible. English courts have held that this obligation requires the local authorities to do whatever they reasonably can to ensure that education is available. In one particular case, the duty of the local education authority to secure sufficient school places for all children within the compulsory school age was not fully implemented and 300 children were deprived of primary education because of a shortage of teachers. The court held that the authority did whatever was in its powers to rectify the situation and was thus not in breach of its statutory duty. 9 1.1 Funding for public and private schools Securing that education is available reveals a variety of models: the government can fund diverse schools but not operate any, or operate a network of state and/or public schools without funding any non-state schools. The extremes of a state’s monopoly over education or its complete dissociation from education, neither of which would be consistent with international human rights law, 9 R. v. Inner London Education Authority, ex parte Ali, [1990] C.O.D. 317, [1990] 2 Admin.L.R. 822, 828B. Right to Education Primers No. 3 19