A/69/266 Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar visited in 2014 and stated that community-based, political and religious groups had been conducting, with impunity, well-organized and coordinated campaigns of incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence against Rohingya and other Muslim minorities (A/HRC/25/64, para. 21). He noted the propagation of an agenda to rid Rakhine State of the estimated one million Rohingyas who lived there and concluded that the pattern of widespread and systematic human rights violations in Rakhine State might constitute crimes against humanity ( A/HRC/25/64, paras. 45 and 51). 11. In the Central African Republic, armed clashes escalated in 2014, with Christians and Muslims launching reprisal attacks against each other in a country that had rarely before experienced such sectarian violence. In March 2014, the United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide described the abuses as crimes against humanity and stated that Muslims were being deliberately and systematically targeted by the anti-balaka militias and by mobs of civilians in Bangui and in the countryside. 4 He had warned in November 2013 of the risk of genocide. 5 III. International legal framework 12. The Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (General Assembly resolution 47/135, annex) has established that States “shall protect the existence and the national or ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic identity of minorities within their respective territories and shall encourage conditions for the promotion of that identity” (art. 1, para. 1). Its preamble emphasizes that the promotion and protection of the rights of persons belonging to minorities contribute to the political and social stability of States in which they live and that the constant promotion and reali zation of their rights as “an integral part of the development of society as a whole and within a democratic framework based on the rule of law, would contribute to the strengthening of friendship and cooperation among peoples and States”. 13. In its commentary on the Declaration (see E/CN.4/Sub.2/AC.5/2005/2), the Working Group on Minorities stated that the protection of the existence of minorities included their physical existence, their continued existence on the territories on which they lived and their continued access to the material resources required to continue their existence on those territories, and that they should neither be physically excluded from the territory nor excluded from access to the resources required for their livelihood. The Working Group considered that the right to existence in its physical sense was sustained by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and that forced population transfers intended to move persons belonging to minorities away from the territory on which they lived, or with that effect, would constitute serious breaches of contemporary international standards, including the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. 14. In the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (General Assembly resolution 260 A (III), annex), genocide is recognized as an __________________ 4 5 14-58850 www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/2014-03-12%20Statement%20of%20USG%20 Adama%20Dieng%20to%20the%20Security%20%20Council.%20FINAL.pdf. www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/Statement%20by%20Mr.%20Adama% 20Dieng,%20United%20Nations%20Special%20Adviser%20on%20the%20Prevention%20of%2 0Genocide,%20at%20the%20Arria%20Formula%20Meeting%20of%20.pdf. 5/24