Educational Rights of Disabled Children in Saudi Arabia and their Role in Advancing Human Rights

Abstract

Saudi Arabia, or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is one of the statutory members of The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC or CRC). The key initiatives that Saudi Arabia has introduced to enhance and safeguard the right to education for children with disabilities include enacting its own disability law under the disability code, using its Ministry of Education to push for an inclusion strategy for children with disabilities, supporting national programmes and initiatives aimed at enhancing and safeguarding the right to education for children with disabilities, and using legislative policies and regulations such as its Rules And Regulations Of Special Education Programs (RRSEP) to provide guidelines on initiatives that safeguard the right to education for children with disabilities. Despite these measures, the CRC’s commission report of 2016 indicated that Saudi Arabia was still lagging behind in aligning its education system with Article 23 and Article 28 of CRC. Past research studies have also identified issues of concern surrounding the effectiveness of the approach taken by the government of Saudi Arabia to enhance and safeguard the right to education for children with disabilities. Based on this literature, this dissertation recommends three key initiatives to improve Saudi Arabia’s effectiveness and ability to enhance and safeguard these rights, with reference to ideas derived from UNCRC articles. These three recommendations are: to dedicate more resources to fund the inclusion initiative, to develop the curriculum for educators, and to promote stakeholder expansion.