pation by governments. This means that opportunities for promoting dialogue are often missed. It is useful to inform your government representative in Geneva that you will be attending the WGM. You could submit your intervention to them or at least outline the issues you intend to raise, in order to encourage their attendance. You may prefer to wait until you have left your country to travel to Geneva, before informing your mission of your attendance, if you are concerned that your government may try to prevent you from travelling. It is also possible, and often very productive, for NGOs to meet with representatives of their government missions outside the WGM sessions. If you send a copy of your intervention in advance to your mission, you can request a meeting to discuss it (it often helps to allow a few days for them to communicate with the central government in the capital regarding the issues you bring up). Even if you are unable to submit your intervention in advance, it is still worth making contact with the mission. Minority activists have reported that due to the neutral territory of the UN, they have been able to engage in dialogue with the Geneva mission in a way that is impossible back home, and that their participation in a UN forum confers prestige on them that encourages the government to take them more seriously. Since the audience at the WGM is relatively small, and the WGM mandate limited, the impact of your intervention will also be limited. All the WGM can do is encourage dialogue with your government representative, if they are present at the session, or communicate the intervention to the government mission, if they are not present. Some points in your intervention may be recordCase study: CEMIRIDE and the WGM A representative of the Centre for Minority Rights Development (CEMIRIDE), Kenya, attended the WGM in 2002. They describe the positive impact of their participation on their work: ‘CEMIRIDE put the Ogiek issue onto the international agenda at the Working Group on Minorities. The government took the issue on board, the Lands Minister had a meeting with us. Now the Minister is in consultations with the Ogiek people. All this is due to the international focus, which began with the WGM. We used the statements we made at the WGM to lobby the government. Now we have an official statement from the President that minority rights have to be protected in the new Constitution. We believe that the fact that we tabled these issues at the WGM contributed to these developments, and made it easier for us to gain access to the government – they take us more seriously. And for most minorities, the WGM is the only avenue of access to the UN system.’ MINORITY RIGHTS: A GUIDE TO UNITED NATIONS PROCEDURES AND INSTITUTIONS ed in the final report of the WGM; however, due to lack of space, it is unlikely to be more than a few sentences. This means that it is important for you to maximize the potential impact of your intervention through seeking dialogue with your government representatives (as described above) and by publicizing your intervention. You can do this by rewriting it in a form suitable for sending to the media in your country and by contacting journalists based in Geneva. (See section 1 for more details on media work in Geneva.) You can maximize the impact of your attendance at the WGM by using your time in Geneva to make useful contacts and arrange other meetings with people who can assist in your work, such as inter-governmental and UN agencies, other minoritybased NGOs, etc. NGOs can prepare a short paper for the WGM. Papers are often thematic, although some are country specific. Not all papers are accepted by the WGM. Those accepted will be issued as working papers with a UN document reference and they can be discussed during the WGM session. Working papers from previous sessions of the WGM can be found at: http://www.unhchr.ch/ minorities/group.htm. For more information on submitting a paper, contact the WGM secretariat. Once a paper has been introduced, the chair often shapes the discussions so that participants can raise their hands and make comments. These comments are in addition to the oral intervention permitted under each agenda item, and in this way NGOs can further contribute to the debate on issues concerning their communities. Other WGM activities As with other UN human rights bodies, the WGM can only make country visits at the invitation of the government. The WGM has made two country visits – to Mauritius in September 2001, and to Finland in January 2004. The objective of the visits was for the WGM to examine the experience of the respective countries in the accommodation of minority groups and to highlight good practice. WGM members met with government representatives, journalists, NGOs and members of minority communities during the visit, and issued a report 43 including recommendations for action. Financial constraints are one of the reasons why the WGM has not visited more states; even if a government issues an invitation, unless it can also pay for the visit, the WGM does not have the funds to go. The WGM has organized a series of regional meetings aiming to address, in greater detail, issues relating to that region. Three seminars, in Tanzania, Mali and Botswana addressed multiculturalism in Africa, including the constructive accommodation of different minority groups. Afro-descendants’ rights were the focus of seminars in Honduras and Canada. They addressed the situation of 33