E/CN.4/2001/21 page 37 V. FOLLOW-UP TO FIELD VISITS: LEGISLATIVE, JUDICIAL OR OTHER MEASURES TAKEN OR ENVISAGED BY GOVERNMENTS A. South Africa 114. South Africa held a National Conference on Racism in August 2000. The report of the Conference has been transmitted to the Special Rapporteur. The objectives of the Conference were: “to provide a platform for South Africans to share their experiences about racism; to engage one another in dialogue about race relations in modern democratic South Africa and assess the extent to which the vision or our Constitution is lived and experienced by South Africans and share common perspectives about how to build a non-racial, united and reconciled society; to analyse the nature, dynamics and manifestations of racism in a democratic society and to examine the reasons for the persistence of all forms of racism; to make commitments about building a new, reconciled and united society in South Africa at all levels; and to prepare for the third United Nations World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance scheduled to take place in South Africa in August/September 2001”. The Conference, which was attended by 750 delegates, was intended to deal with the history and consequences of racism in South Africa and to discuss ways the country could move beyond it. South Africa remains full of examples of prejudices, from white attacks on blacks and massive economic disparities between racial groups to black xenophobia attacks on immigrants from other African countries. 115. The Conference concluded inter alia that the elimination of racial discrimination in South African society would help to eradicate poverty; it called on the Government to adopt measures of positive discrimination (affirmative action) to eliminate the consequences of apartheid. The Conference further recommended that the Government should take measures to curb xenophobia, particularly in the field of immigration and crime prevention. B. Germany 116. The following information supplements the details provided in the report to the fifty-fifth session of the General Assembly (A/55/304, paras. 28-31). Germany is stepping up its efforts to combat neo-Nazism. Thus, on 30 August 2000, a court in Halle dealt severely with extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi elements by imposing heavy exemplary sentences for beating to death Alfredo Adriano, a Mozambican. A 24-year-old unemployed baker was sentenced to life imprisonment, and his two 16-year-old accomplices to nine years in prison. This judgement contrasts markedly with certain decisions in the past in which racist crimes have been classified as intentional wounding with a fatal outcome but without intent to cause death, as in the case of the murder of an Angolan in September 1992 at Frankfurt an der Oder on the Polish border, for which the culprits were given sentences ranging from two years’ (suspended) to four years’ imprisonment. Germany is therefore taking steps to curb the resurgence of xenophobic violence in certain regions of the country. At the same time, the Government has asked the Constitutional Court to ban an extreme right-wing party, the NPD.