"RELATING TO CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE LAWS ON THE USE OF LANGUAGES 99 IN EDUCATION IN BELGIUM" v. BELGIUM (MERITS) JUDGMENT INDIVIDUAL OPINION, PARTLY DISSENTING (POINT I OF THE OPERATIVE PROVISIONS OF THE JUDGMENT), OF JUDGE TERJE WOLD Several of the articles of the Convention apply the word "right" - Article 9 (art. 9): Right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; Article 10 (art. 10): Right to freedom of expression, etc. These rights obviously do not impose upon the member States any positive obligation in regard to guaranteeing the individual citizen "the right" to use for instance the existing churches which the State may own, or to use the means of expression, for instance printing works, newspapers or broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises, which the State possesses. The "right to education" has the same scope and meaning. It does not imply any positive obligation of the State. A logical interpretation of Article 2 (P1-2) leads to the same result. First, the subject of the right to education is everyone, cf. Article 1 (art. 1). This means that every person within the jurisdiction of any of the member States which has ratified the Convention, has the same individual human right to education. This is not a right of a group or a minority. It is a subjective right of every individual regardless of nationality, race, sex, language. In consequence, it is misleading to formulate the question, which the Court in this case has to decide as a question "if the French in Flanders or the Flemish population in Wallonia have the right to claim education in their national language". All languages hold the same position in regard to the freedom to education. That is expressly said in Article 14 (art. 14). The question before the Court is therefore in fact the following: has every individual person in Belgium the right to claim education in his own national language – a Chinese, a Japanese, an American, a Portuguese? Or, if we accept the majority interpretation of the concept "right to education" as a "right to access": has every person on Belgian territory the same individual human right to access to all Belgian schools and educational institutions in the country, has a Chinese, a Japanese, an American, a Portuguese the same rights of access as the Belgian nationals themselves? Of course not. The fact that the beneficiaries of the right to education granted by the Convention are, so to say, every person on the earth, and the fact that the right is bestowed on all without distinction on any ground, must be taken seriously into consideration when deciding what the content of the "right to education" in the meaning of Article 2 (P1-2) really is. It goes almost without saying that this right cannot go further than to a freedom for the individual to choose the education he wants without interference by the State. That right belongs to everyone, and it is the same for everyone, regardless of country. This is a fundamental principle in the field of Human Rights. That the right to education was meant as freedom of choice is also strongly upheld in the Preparatory Works. The right to education was from the very beginning listed as one of the three family rights (Preparatory work on Article 2 of the Protocol (P1-2), p. 5, document CDH (67) 2) and defined