The Ministry of Education’s Unit of Allied Arts says that no request has been received from the Rights of the Child Commission (RCC) for information on the exclusion of two children from the recent children’s Mashramani contest.
In a statement yesterday, the ministry was responding to a report in the March 27th edition of Stabroek News which said that RCC’s Chief Executive Officer, Andre Gonsalves had stated that the commission has been in touch with the Allied Arts Unit of the Ministry and was awaiting some key information from the relevant authorities there
In the statement, the ministry said: “So far no request for information has been received from the Rights of the Child Com-mission. It is important to emphasize that the Unit of Allied Arts welcomes any requests from statutory bodies such as the Rights of the Child Commission. However, we were unaware of any investigation into this matter until it was brought to our attention through a news article titled `Rights commission awaiting info on exclusion of children from Mash contests’ published by Stabroek News. While we take note of this article, it is surprising that such a publication was made without any formal requests being directed to the Unit of Allied Arts either by the ROC or the Stabroek News”.
