PREFACE It is an honour and a pleasure to write this brief preface to ICERD and CERD: A Guide for Civil Society Actors. IMADR and Daisuke Shirane should be congratulated for taking on the challenge of updating and re-writing the excellent Guide prepared by the late and sadly missed Atsuko Tanaka and by Yoshinobu Nagamine in 2001 – coincidentally the year in which the present writer joined CERD. The older Guide has proved its worth. I do not have a precise knowledge of its readership but sense that it played its part in increasing civil society understanding of the norms and the procedures of ICERD over the years since its publication. As a member of CERD, I never fail to take a copy of the Tanaka/Nagamine Guide with me to CERD sessions, and fully expect to use the new Guide in a similar fashion. We may be confident that the present volume will enjoy comparable success in sustaining and deepening the interest of civil society in the international community’s most important single instrument in the field of combating racial discrimination. A great deal has happened in the life of ICERD since 2001. The number of States parties has increased from 156 to 174. There have been major developments in ICERD’s reporting procedure, notably in terms of the Committee’s increased ‘friendliness’ to national and international NGOs and NHRIs. CERD is required to ‘examine’ the reports of States parties. Such examination necessitates an active civil society input in order to make a reality of the notion of a ‘constructive’ dialogue: otherwise the ‘dialogue’ could be reduced to a mere page-turning exercise. This does not imply lack of trust in information supplied, but what it does mean is that all sources of information, including civil society information, must be critically and professionally appraised by the Committee before the adoption of concluding observations. Other important areas of progress in the working methods of CERD include the further establishment and regularisation of the early warning and urgent action procedure, and key developments with respect to follow-up in the context of the reporting and communications procedures. The number of General Recommendations adopted by CERD has moved up from 27 to 33. Less impressively, the number of States parties accepting the optional article 14 individual communications procedure has risen to only 54. This leaves the great majority of States parties outside the range of the article. Further, the number of States that have been implicated in the procedure remains stubbornly low, suggesting, inter alia, that article 14 is not as well known to civil society as it ought to be. It is sincerely to be hoped that the present Guide will encourage civil society to activate this important safety valve for victims of racial discrimination. Supported by the above procedural moves, the decade since 2001 has witnessed a consolidation of CERD’s concern for an increasing range of groups threatened by racial discrimination. This has occurred notably in the context of general recommendations setting out the legal bases for the recognition of categories of victim but is implicated in all aspects of procedural development. The general recommendations on indigenous peoples, on gender dimensions of racial discrimination, and on the Roma are all referred to in the 2001 Guide. Concern for such groups and categories has been sustained and enlarged by the Committee which has added fresh instruments on descent and caste, and on non-citizens, with a general recommendation on discrimination against people of African descent due shortly for consideration and adoption. The enlargement of CERD’s concerns has moved pari passu with geopolitical and normative changes since the 1970s, notably in the recognition of new categories of right-holder, and has in turn served to provide a legal cutting edge to defend their rights. Since its first sessions in the 1970s, CERD has also worked to enlarge our understanding of the global incidence of racial discrimination, even if it looms larger in the reality of some societies more than others. It has also highlighted the involvement of private actors in discrimination, has been resolute on the issue of racist hate speech, and has stressed the importance of education as the surest method of addressing discrimination in the long term. Improving the legal architecture within States, including the institutionalisation of remedies for discrimination, has also been a major concern. viii ICERD & CERD: A GUIDE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY ACTORS