A/66/269 dearth of resources. The assessment prepared for the 2010 High-level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly on the Millennium Development Goals underlined the need for scaling up budgets and providing enhanced resources to accelerate progress in meeting those targets. 4 The Education for All Global Monitoring Reports in recent years have consistently pointed to insufficient funding for education. More recently, public expenditure cuts as a consequence of the global financial crisis have threatened to decrease support to the education sector, possibly jeopardizing recent advances. 5 For instance, 7 of 18 low-income countries reduced spending on education in 2009; those countries alone had 3.7 million children out of school. 6 6. In view of the critical need to overcome resource constraints for the realization of the right to education and for the achievement of internationally agreed goals such as the millennium development goals and Education for All, in the present report the Special Rapporteur recalls States’ obligations regarding the provision of domestic resources for basic education and presents examples of national legal instruments adopted to secure adequate financial resources for education. A. Human rights obligations for financing education 7. In accordance with international human rights treaties, States are responsible for providing resources to ensure the enjoyment of human rights. Providing the necessary resources for the enjoyment of the right to education is all the more important, given that the enjoyment of this right is essential for the exercise of all other human rights. It deserves high priority in public investment, as both the individual and society are its beneficiaries. 8. States’ obligations to ensure the provision of full resources to overcome constraints to the realization of the right to education consistently figure in the concluding observations adopted by the United Nations human rights treaty bodies. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Committee on the Rights of the Child have often expressed concern about declining educational standards due to lack of State investment in education and have recommended that the resources allocated to the education sector should be increased. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has also systematically urged States to increase investment in education as a fundamental human right and as a basis for the empowerment of women. Recommendations resulting from the Universal Periodic Review process of the Human Rights Council for the provision of increased resources to education further confirm the wide recognition of the central relevance of financing education for the fulfilment of human rights obligations. 7 9. Commitments to finance education are also present in the International Labour Organization (ILO)/United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization __________________ 4 5 6 7 4 A/64/665, para. 71 (b). Several publications of the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning on the financing of education have also addressed this issue. UNESCO, Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2011, The Hidden Crisis: Armed Conflict and Education, p. 12. For example, recommendations addressed in 2009 and 2010 to Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia and Spain. 11-44589