Official finding Islamic institutions and contexts Quranic-school and daara systems Chad · 2009

Chad: the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child reports children in Koranic schools chained up for being considered rebellious, and beaten if they fail to bring back enough money from begging

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Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

the Mouhadjir — the Koranic teacher on whose behalf the Committee records children being sent out to beg

Organization

United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Republic of Chad

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

Children are placed in Koranic schools for religious instruction, and it is that teaching relationship which puts them in the charge of a Mouhadjir. The Committee records that within it children are chained for being considered rebellious, sent out to beg on the teacher's behalf, and beaten for returning with too little — the teacher's authority over his pupils being what makes the confinement and the quota enforceable.

Institutional obedience or isolation
Guru or spiritual-teacher authority

Scope decision

This record does NOT rely on CODEBOOK §11 and is not coded fusedAuthority. A Koranic teacher is a religious figure in his own right, so the ordinary criterion is satisfied without the fused-authority clause. This is an official finding by a United Nations treaty body, not a criminal proceeding: nobody was prosecuted, no court has adjudicated anything recorded here, and no individual teacher or school is named or accused. The Committee's own framing is that these are reports before it, and the record reproduces that qualification rather than stating the practice as adjudicated fact. No figure is asserted for how many children are affected, because the Committee gives none. Koranic schooling is not itself the subject of this record: the finding concerns chaining, forced begging and beating, not religious education, and the great majority of such schools are not implicated by it. The archive holds related records concerning Qur'anic-school begging in Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire; this is a separate national finding for Chad, which held no records before it. The observations describe Chad as at January 2009.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2009-01-30 · concluding observations adopted

United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (treaty body established under the Convention on the Rights of the Child). In its concluding observations on the second periodic report of Chad the Committee, addressing torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, 'note[d] with concern reports that children in Koranic schools are often chained up because they are considered difficult or rebellious and that some children are forced to go out begging on behalf of their Mouhadjir, and are beaten if they do not bring back a certain amount of money'. It recommended that the State party 'take all necessary measures to prevent, prohibit and protect children from all forms of torture or other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment in all settings', stating that 'particular attention should be paid to the situation of Mouhadjirin children', and that Chad review its legislation to provide an explicit prohibition of torture in the Penal Code, which the Committee found lacked any explicit definition of the term.

Documented coercion mechanisms

chaining up children considered difficult or rebellious
forced street begging on behalf of the teacher
beating children who fail to return a set amount of money
religious instruction as the basis on which children are placed in the teacher's charge

Cited record

Sources

un treaty body concluding observations United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Concluding observations: Chad, CRC/C/TCD/CO/2 (adopted 30 January 2009).: The Committee's own concluding observations, retrieved as PDF from the United Nations documents system and read in full. Paragraph 41, under the heading of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, records that the Committee 'notes with concern reports that children in Koranic schools are often chained up because they are considered difficult or rebellious and that some children are forced to go out begging on behalf of their Mouhadjir, and are beaten if they do not bring back a certain amount of money', and separately that the Penal Code lacks an explicit definition of torture. Paragraph 42 recommends that the State party 'take all necessary measures to prevent, prohibit and protect children from all forms of torture or other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment in all settings', adding that 'particular attention should be paid to the situation of Mouhadjirin children'.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=CRC%2FC%2FTCD%2FCO%2F2&l=en&t=pdf Corpus classification: un-treaty-body; evidentiary role: concluding-observations.
Retrieval: 2026-07-29 · Preserved; Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-29 (CRC channel; UN document retrieved directly from documents.un.org, PDF magic bytes verified, converted with pdftotext and paragraphs 41 and 42 checked verbatim before drafting)

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