Presentation by Vernor Muñoz, Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, to the First Session of the Minorities Forum of the United Nations Human Rights Council 15-16 of December 2008 As we are commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I would like to begin this brief presentation recalling that this Magna Carta of Humanity, as Eleonor Roosevelt called it, not only comprised a body of rights but also a series of obligations Essential for states. Certainly, it is a set of interrelated obligations, which today call for solidarity and the affirmation of the human rights of millions of Dalits living in conditions of segregation. In some regions, Dalits communities reach barely 10% of literacy, and in cases where students succeed in enrolling, they are victims of exclusion processes that prevent them from completing the school year. We have witnessed the lack of opportunities for the Roma population, whose exclusion from educational opportunities is expressed in unemployment rates above 70%. This exclusion was manifested in the European Court's decision of November 13, 2007, which establishes that the segregation of the Roma population in special education centres is discriminatory. Indigenous communities continue to suffer assimilation that dramatically annuls their worldviews, and also systematically eliminates their languages, cultures and traditions. Afro-descendant communities, which struggle against the stereotypes of intolerant societies and migrants, refugees and stateless people, who do not find educational responses adequate to their needs. Lesbian students and homosexual students, who continue to be expelled from universities and colleges and people with disabilities, continue to be relegated to the absence of a truly inclusive education that respects their rights and responds to their special educational needs. It would be difficult to list all the communities and people who in certain circumstances become social minorities and who, because of this condition and the existing prejudices, are victims of insensitive public policies and of societies that fail to accept diversity as a necessary social option for the construction of egalitarian and pacifist communities. The same term minority is perhaps inadequate, since in our world there are also social and economic minorities, mainly, who do not suffer any type of discrimination and who, rather, make efforts not to show their privileges. In any case, the conceptual and operational framework of the right to education, which involves the already well-known scheme of state obligations known as the 4 A’s (affordability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability), implies the constant interrelation of these components. This framework is neither sequential nor linear and its interpretation must not reproduce the kind of mechanistic rationality