A/59/329
V. Conclusions and recommendations
45. The Special Rapporteur will submit to the Commission on Human Rights
at its sixty-first session detailed recommendations on the issues covered by his
mandate, particularly in the light of his visits. He therefore wishes to draw the
attention of the General Assembly to the following:
• When contemplating future measures against racism, discrimination and
xenophobia, the General Assembly is invited to consider the complicating
factor that contemporary forms of racism conflate religion and culture
with ethnicity or race;
• The General Assembly is invited to take into account and alert Member
States to the growing importance of the intellectual front in the fight
against racism, discrimination and xenophobia and the need to devise an
intellectual strategy for combating those phenomena in the domain of
ideas, concepts, images, perceptions and value systems;
• In the light of the “RER C train” incident in France, the General
Assembly should speak out against the exploitation of the fight against all
forms of racism as a political, media and intellectual tool, and in favour of
a set of ethics for that fight based on the values of universality, equality
and objectivity;
• The General Assembly is invited to alert the Member States to the need to
take the necessary legislative and judicial action, as well as measures in
the area of information and education, in order to ensure that the
legitimate struggle against terrorism does not result in or breed new forms
of discrimination targeting specific populations, religions, cultures or
ethnic groups;
• In the context of implementing the Programme of Action of the Durban
Conference, the General Assembly is invited to focus its attention on the
latest forms of discrimination, which affect, in particular, immigrants,
refugees and non-citizens and make them particularly vulnerable;
• The General Assembly is invited to draw the attention of Member States
to the resurgence of xenophobia and to the fact that, while anchoring
human rights in legal instruments is a fundamental way of expressing
their universality, it is no longer capable of eliminating the underlying
causes of discriminatory culture and mentalities. Action on human rights
must henceforth include discussion of the deep cultural roots of racism;
• The General Assembly is invited both to draw the attention of all Member
States to increased racism in sports and to call on international sports
entities to take appropriate measures to eradicate it and cooperate to that
end with the relevant human rights mechanisms, in particular the
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Special
Rapporteur;
• Finally, the General Assembly is invited to alert all Member States to the
need to adopt measures to counter the dissemination of discriminatory,
racist and xenophobic messages on the Internet, in accordance with
paragraphs 144 to 147 of the Durban Programme of Action.
20