Colleagues and friends. I feel a great honour to be allowed speak on this forum on behalf of United Nations Committee on All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) which I am a member. On the chairperson of CERD Ambassador Anya Kamal I would like to sincerely thank the Office of the Independent Expert on Minority Issues for this invitation. All issues relating to minorities are very close to our hearts in CERD and therefore we take this forum very seriously. It is a serious attempt to deal with the issues of discrimination, and marginalisation of sections of our societies. Madam Chair in its guidance to the paper presenters the Secretariat of this forum indicating inter alia that we should not read academic papers, they would welcome comments focused on the recommendations. That is what we have decided to do, that is to focus on the draft recommendations on minorities and their participation in economic life, which were made available to us quite early. Madam Chair, I hope that this will not bore you if we make our comments direct on the recommendations, paragraph by paragraph. As time is of essence we shall concentrate on the main issues only and then make presentation available to the Secretariat however before I do that I would like to make two main comments. First one is on engagement of CERD in issues affecting minorities, they work of the CERD in the area of minorities is captured very well in paragraph 47 on the recommendations at footnote number 5. Here it has been correctly noted that CERD has issued three general recommendations which in one way or another touch on minorities. These are general recommendation 27, on discrimination against the Roma, general recommendation 29 on discrimination based on descent and general recommendation 32 on meaning and scope of speacial measures, here it is important to note Madam Chair that te Committee has also established a working group on early warning and urgent action, this group is intended to advise state parties on laws and policies which are likely to lead to discrimination and advise the UN and the state parties concerned. There might be issues of discrimination to come up in future. Most of the work of this group which reports to the whole committee has been on marginalisation of minorities in all parts of the world. That is from the Americans to Africa and Asia, also a number of states have been invited by CERD or the states themselves have sought audience with te committee to dialogue on burning issues relating to minorities in their territories. At the same time, issues relating to minorities have been featuring prominently in the dialogues carried out between CERD and the State parties on the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination ICERD in the process of presenting their reports. Thus concluding observatiosns of the Committee on the reports of many state parties contain specific observations on minorities. The second main point, Madam Chair that I would like to make is in relation to the use of the term reduction of poverty. Now the issue we are asking here is whether we are asking for the reduction of poverty or eridcation of poverty. If you read through the document you find a lot of use of the word "reduction of poverty", we take it that, we sometimes take terms put on us without much reflection and what we are saying is we should thrive for moving towards the eradication of poverty and not reduction because Madam Chair if you reduce poverty, poverty will still be there. And therefore there is a need in this recommendation to use progressive language which gives hope to minorities and therefore I would ask the drafters of the reocmmendations, maybe to revisit and