Recommendations in Relation to APF States Afghanistan The ACJ recommends that the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) urge its Government to address the following issues: • consider signing the UNESCO Convention Against Discrimination in Education, the ILO Minimum Age Convention and the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention; • the necessity to allocate additional budget resources to the education sector and to minimise the imposition of fees and additional costs on parents; • the lack of access to schools and other education facilities for girls and married women, particularly in rural areas; • the need to improve education infrastructure including classrooms, libraries, laboratories and sanitation facilities; • the need to increase the availability of qualified, experienced and properly remunerated teachers and to provide teachers with access to additional training; • the need to adopt measures to address gender disparity and gender inequality in education at all levels, particularly for girls and women in rural areas; and • the need to adopt measures to prohibit the use of corporal punishment and to adopt alternative non-violent forms of discipline at all levels of education. Australia The ACJ recommends that the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) urge its government to address the following issues: • the need to provide adequate infrastructure for schools in rural and remote communities, including information technology, library and sporting facilities and maintenance support; • the need to improve the recruitment and retention of teachers in rural and remote areas (and some metropolitan areas) and to improve the representation of prospective teachers from Indigenous and other cultural, social and ethnic groups; • the need to improve access to education services in rural and remote areas for students with disabilities; • the need to develop a coherent and consistent approach to human rights education with a formal role in the education system; and 18