Access to Education Despite broad acceptance of the obligation to provide primary education to children of all statuses,109 including stateless and refugee children, each country faces significant practical hurdles in the implementation of this right. These include a lack of civil registration or refugee status documentation and the exclusionary financial burden of costs such as educational materials and examination fees. In some countries, where accessing primary education is generally possible, stateless individuals and refugees may nevertheless be excluded from continuing their education at the secondary and tertiary levels. The positive practices included under this subsection thus focus on clarifying the applicability to stateless and refugee communities of the right to access education, as well as other policies and initiatives aimed at overcoming bureaucratic and practical barriers to enrollment in public schools for members of these groups. Legislative Practice Domestic Codification of Access to Education as the Right of All Children In Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Thailand, legislation has been adopted to implement Article 28(a) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child at the national level, explicitly recognizing that the right to education extends to non-citizen children. PAKISTAN The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2012 guarantees the fundamental right to free and compulsory education in a neighborhood school to all children, regardless of sex, nationality, or race, making no mention of immigration status. BANGLADESH The state’s obligation to provide free and compulsory education to all children is affirmed in Article 17 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, and the Primary Education (Compulsory) Act, 1990 provides the government with the power to issue orders declaring primary education mandatory for all children ages six to ten who live within the area specified in these orders. 30 UND OING PRECARIT Y: ELE VATING P OSITIVE PR ACTICES FOR REFU GEE PROTECTION IN SO U TH AND SO U THE AST ASIA