The United Nations Finally Acknowledged the Right to Free Education. OMEP Has Been Fighting for This Moment for 75 Years

When governments stall, budgets vanish, or international organizations make cautious statements that say very little and commit to even less, there is a certain kind of patience that only comes from conviction. For 75 years, OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, has been patient. Finally, something changed at the Palais des Nations in Geneva in September 2025.

There is weight in the setting itself. With its high ceilings, heavy diplomacy, and subtle institutional odor of documents and consequence, the Palais des Nations is the kind of building where the air feels older than most living people. Here, from September 1 to 3, 2025, the United Nations held the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Working Group investigating the creation of a new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which would, for the first time in legally binding international law, guarantee every child the right to free education, including at least a year of universal, free, public pre-primary schooling.

There were ninety-two member states present. There were more than a hundred civil society organizations present. Additionally, OMEP was present, having worked for a seat at that table for a longer period of time than the majority of international organizations have even been in existence. Despite this, most headlines still manage to ignore this organization.

On September 2, OMEP’s World President, Mercedes Mayol Lassalle, spoke at the panel on Early Childhood Care and Education as Part of the Right to Education. It wasn’t very difficult what she said. It was actually the same argument OMEP has been making since 1948: that the right to education starts at birth rather than at age six or seven, and that putting pre-primary education in what she called a “legal gray zone” is a moral failure that affects hundreds of millions of children rather than a technicality. Everyone has the right to education, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The youngest children, who stand to gain the most from early investment and have the least political clout to demand it, were never fully addressed.

Observing these processes gives the impression that the international community has long recognized the argument and has just decided not to take any action. There has never been any uncertainty in the data. It was explained quite clearly in the 2024 Global Report on Early Childhood Care and Education by UNESCO and UNICEF. The evidence was supplemented by OMEP’s own global survey conducted in 2025. At this point, the research demonstrating the enormous developmental, economic, and social benefits of high-quality early childhood education is as solid as it gets. Knowledge is not what has been lacking. It’s procedural patience disguised as political will.

Because of this, the Geneva session was fascinating and deserving of careful consideration. Thirty-one states made it clear that they were in favor of proceeding with a binding protocol. Eight provided conditional assistance. Just three expressed outright opposition. The distance between voicing support in a working group session and actually ratifying an international treaty is huge, and it involves the kind of budgetary and legislative negotiations that can covertly take ten years, so those figures don’t guarantee anything. However, the current direction of travel feels different. Maybe something real is developing.

The working group was also addressed by five children who were chosen from various parts of the world. That could easily be interpreted as symbolic theater, and in UN contexts, it occasionally is. However, it is said that the statements were accepted. One child stated that education is not a reward. It’s a right. Since the organization’s founding in the wake of World War II, when a group of educators and child welfare advocates decided that the protection of young children needed a permanent international voice, OMEP has insisted on this framing, as straightforward as it may sound.

A progress report to the Human Rights Council by June 2026, additional consultations, and a potential draft of key principles prior to a second session in late August 2026 are the incremental next steps for the working group. This doesn’t move very quickly. When the more difficult discussions about funding start, it’s still unclear if the political momentum will continue and if the states that have shown support will stick together. When free pre-primary education is made mandatory by law, governments are unable to just blame financial limitations. That’s the entire purpose of a legally binding document, and it’s also the aspect that clearly unnerves certain governments.

Over the course of 75 years and more than 80 national committees, OMEP has proven that remaining in the room is important. Not only for visibility, but also due to the accumulation of arguments. Because it is morally wrong and avoidable for every generation of impoverished children to be born without access to high-quality early care and education. The work is incremental, the progress is slow, and every now and then—in a Geneva formal hall in early September of an otherwise ordinary year—the world moves a little closer to what ought to have been clear all along.