Baku, Azerbaijan, Aug. 29
By Farhad Daneshvar – Trend:
Iran’s new Minister of Education Mohammad Bat'haei has joined a social media campaign urging the right of education for the Afghanistani refugees currently in Iran.
Despite the fact that, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had issued an order permitting schooling, regardless of their residency status, to all refugee children in Iran back in 2015, access to the education appears to be full of obstacles for many Afghans residing in the Islamic Republic.
Mohammad Bat'haei in a recent Twitter post said that, “access to education, under any circumstances, is a right [given] to all individuals,” pledging to make full efforts aimed at upholding the right of education to every student from any nationality.
Famous Iranian actor, Habib Rezaee is also among those who support Afghanistani kids’ right of education, in view of upcoming academic year.
Saying that childhood should not be bound by any borders, Habib Rezaee called on Iranians to help on prevention of injustices faced by the refugees.
Currently, Iran has become one of the most refugee flooded countries in the world. The majority of refugees in Iran are from Afghanistan.
Back in 2015, Iranian officials had announced that, more than 350,000 Afghanistani children were registered and were legally attending the local schools, while approximately 500,000 of them could not attend schools due to the lack of identity papers.
Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, about six million Afghans fled to the neighboring Iran and Pakistan. After almost four decades since the Soviet invasion, 1.5 million Afghans registered as refugees are still reside in Iran.