A/HRC/11/36 page 2 Summary The present report is submitted pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 7/34. It is the first report submitted to the Council by the present mandate holder, whose appointment started on 1 August 2008. It was prepared after the conclusion of the Durban Review Conference, held in April 2009, and examines in detail its outcome document, as well as the Special Rapporteur’s reflections on the Durban Review process. The Special Rapporteur also addresses the issue of poverty and racism, which he considers one of the fundamental challenges in the fight against racism. The Durban Review Conference was particularly important to mark the renewal of the international engagement against racism. During the preparatory process leading up to the Conference, the Special Rapporteur requested Member States to approach the Review Conference constructively and in a cooperative spirit, arguing that the problems relating to racism were too important for the Conference to be allowed to fail. Despite the absence of some Member States, the outcome document of the Durban Review Conference was adopted consensually by all Member States attending the Conference; a remarkable achievement, particularly in the highly tense political atmosphere surrounding the Conference. A central dimension of the fight against racism is the overlap between two key social indicators: class and race or ethnicity. Throughout his mandate, the Special Rapporteur intends to examine this question in depth in order to provide sound and policy-oriented recommendations to Member States. For many reasons, including the lack of ethnically disaggregated data, the links between race and poverty have yet to be fully elucidated. In particular, there are no existing instruments for this type of data collection worldwide, which would allow for cross-regional comparison of the levels of poverty in minorities. However, national data for many countries unambiguously show that racial or ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by poverty. The Special Rapporteur recalls that the socio-economic vulnerability of minorities is frequently the result of historical legacies, such as slavery across the American continent, systems of inherited status in other continents and also of systems of formalized and State-sponsored discrimination against minorities that were long in place in many parts of the world. Because of the inaction of Governments, imbalances that were historically created continued to profoundly affect minority groups long after formalized discrimination was dismantled. The Special Rapporteur highlights that a number of concrete measures are needed in order to address the disproportionate levels of poverty enjoyed by members of minorities.