A/HRC/43/47 Nepal, Paraguay, South Africa, South Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Timor-Leste and Vanuatu, to whom he has made requests to visit. 8. The Special Rapporteur wishes to thank the States that had accepted visits by previous special rapporteurs on minority issues for their cooperation and encourages other States, including those to which requests for visits have been made, to engage positively with the Special Rapporteur. Country visits have helped in addressing fundamental issues pertaining to minorities and in creating effective communication channels to bring together the means to improve technical cooperation and to respond to the need to capitalize on existing and evolving positive practices. In addition to country visits, the Special Rapporteur will ensure continuous and consistent exchanges with Member States on all matters relevant to his mandate. 9. In all of his country visits, the Special Rapporteur focuses on the importance of addressing discrimination, exclusion and other violations of human rights involving particularly vulnerable minorities such as the Roma, of doubly or triply marginalized minority women, and issues pertaining to deaf and hearing-impaired persons who, as users of sign languages, are members of linguistic minorities. During his country visits, the Special Rapporteur emphasizes the need to have consultations with members of those and other marginalized groups and communities. 10. The Special Rapporteur undertook an official visit to Spain from 14 to 25 January 2019. He also conducted a visit to Kyrgyzstan from 6 to 17 December 2019, and the report will be presented to the Human Rights Council in March 2021. B. Communications 11. The Special Rapporteur sent letters of allegation and urgent action letters to the Member States concerned based on information received from diverse sources about human rights violations perpetrated against national, ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. Those communications and the responses thereto are publicly available.2 12. A total of 52 communications have been sent to Governments since January 2019. All of those were sent jointly with other special procedure mandate holders. Of those, 13 were urgent appeals, 32 were letters of allegation, and 7 were other letters expressing legislation and policy concerns. 13. The largest number of communications were sent to States in Europe and Central Asia (17), followed by the Asia and the Pacific (16), the Middle East and North Africa (14) and sub-Saharan Africa (3). Two communications were sent to States in the Americas region. C. Conferences and awareness-raising activities 14. Raising awareness and increasing the visibility of the human rights of minorities has been repeatedly highlighted as an important dimension of the Special Rapporteur’s mandate since his election by the Human Rights Council in June 2017. This has, among other things, taken the form of frequently speaking and contributing to numerous conferences, seminars and meetings internationally, regionally and nationally, throughout the world. He has in particular, whenever the opportunity has presented itself, continuously referred to the minority issues that have been identified as the thematic priorities of his mandate, such as statelessness, education and the language of minorities, hate speech and social media, and the prevention of ethnic conflict. Cross-cutting issues have also frequently been highlighted, including the double or even triple marginalization of minority women, and particularly vulnerable groups such as the Roma and the Dalit. The Special Rapporteur has additionally emphasized on many occasions in his activities the status of users of sign languages as members of a linguistic minority. The present report contains the main 2 See www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/SP/Pages/CommunicationsreportsSP.aspx. 3