A/76/162 37. As the historical examination of the drafting of the Sustainable Development Goals seems to show, however, the current indicators and formulation of the Goals risk hiding the exclusion of vulnerable minorities, since disaggregation is proposed only on a very restricted number of grounds. The global indicator framework for the Sustainable Development Goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by the General Assembly in its resolution 71/313, is not only rights-based to a very limited extent, but also weak on targeting the most vulnerable groups. 38. Of the 169 targets, only around 30 per cent are human-centred, and even fewer are directly worded in terms of human rights. Of 232 unique sustainable development indicators, only around 35 per cent are human-centred, i.e. they measure progress in terms of people and/or their human rights. 26 39. Clearly, the Sustainable Development Goals are much more about development than human rights, with the risk that the most vulnerable and marginalized in society, and therefore the most in need of protection of human rights, may not fare well in the overall United Nations development agenda for 2030, and even be left further behind. Indeed, “of 169 sustainable development targets, only 25 (circa 15 per cent) explicitly focus on gender, 17 (circa 10 per cent) on age (mainly on children and youth), 5 (circa 3 per cent) on persons with disabilities, 2 (circa 1 per cent) on ethnic minorities and 2 (1 per cent) on indigenous peoples. Of 232 sustainable development indicators, 46 (circa 19 per cent) are targeting or are disaggregated by gender, 38 (circa 15.5 per cent) by age, 10 (4 per cent) by disability status, 2 (under 1 per cent) by indigenous status, and none by ethnicity. Hence, 85 per cent of sustainable development targets, and over 80 per cent of sustainable development indicators, actually are not scoped to ‘leave no one behind’”. 27 40. Among those most likely to be left behind are minorities who face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. An indigenous, Roma or Dalit woman or girl, for example, may be doubly marginalized and disadvantaged, and even be particularly vulnerable to abuse and denial of basic human rights protection. Whether their station will be improved under the 2030 Agenda or whether they will fall behind when the majority in a country may enjoy fully the benefits of social and economic development is simply not factored into the Sustainable Development Goal indicators. This is despite widespread research, such as from the Overseas Development Institute, which highlights, for example, that across 16 countries in the Global South, it is the poorest women from disadvantaged minority groups who were the most likely to have missed out on the promises of progress in education and health implicit in the mantra of development. 28 Only focusing on a person’s sex, without acknowledging or taking into account her ethnicity as a key marker of social and economic exclusion, for example, risks masking the intersecting forms of discrimination that combine to exacerbate the marginalization of minority and indigenous women and the inequality they face in terms of benefiting from social and economic development. 41. Some States, although a very small number of them, showed an awareness of this fundamental dimension in their submissions, since they went beyond the requirements of the Sustainable Development Goal indicators and provided disaggregated data on grounds such as ethnicity, and thus provided data that, as pointed out by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in June __________________ 26 27 28 21-09902 Submission by Slava Balan, PhD in Law Candidate, University of Ottawa, and Ecaterina Balan, International Minority Rights Fellow. Ibid. See “Who is being left behind in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America?”, Overseas Development Institute 2016 reports, available from https://odi.org/en/publications/who-is-beingleft-behind-in-sub-saharan-africa-asia-and-latin-america/. 11/22