Chinese mission’s statement on minority women’s right to education at the Forum on Minority Issues (29 November 2011, Palais des Nations) Madam President: The Chinese delegation is honoured to take the floor in the discussion about minority women’s rights, including the right to education, at the Human Rights Council’s Forum on Minority Issues. The Chinese government attaches great importance to minority women’s right to education. In order to accelerate the development of the undertaking of minority nationalities’ elementary education and to increase the inner quality of national minority women, the Chinese government took into great consideration the peculiar problems and difficulties minority women and girls are confronted with, and formulated relevant policies. According to the trait of decentralization of the remote and grazing regions in which the minority nationalities reside, of their poor transport facilities and of the relatively backward education of minority nationalities, the Chinese government set in motion boarding schools in order to solve the problem of children attending school at the appropriate age. In the minority nationalities’ regions around one hundred thousand boarding schools have already been built with more than four million seven hundred thousand resident students. The Chinese government set up and developed schools for each minority, organizing preparatory course classes for minorities and taking into great consideration those candidates among minority nationalities, who were taking the exam to enter the next grade school. The Chinese government attaches great importance to national minority women and children’s right to education, in particular to the opening of women and children classes or female schools in the minorities’ regions, in order to increase the percentage of women and children who enter school. At the moment the universal system of nine years of compulsory school has a coverage of more than 95% in the autonomous minorities’ regions, in the whole country there are more than ten thousand schools of twenty-one ethnic groups of thirteen provinces and autonomous regions which uses minority nationalities’ language to give lessons, with more than six million students, more than sixty minority language types used and over twenty minority writing scripts. The minorities’ right to education, including minority women’s rights, has been adequately ensured. Thank you Madam President.