A/HRC/22/51 religious minorities. To prevent or rectify discriminatory consequences, States should generally consult with representatives of religious minorities before enacting legislation that may infringe on their religious or belief-related convictions and practices, and they should develop and promote policies of “reasonable accommodation” for individual members of minorities to enable them to live in conformity with their convictions. 30. Moreover, systematic attention should be given to multiple and intersectional forms of discrimination, such as discriminatory patterns in the intersection of religious and gender discrimination. It may happen that measures undertaken to combat religious or beliefrelated discrimination implicitly follow a male understanding of the needs and requirements of the respective communities, while programmes aimed at eliminating gender-related discrimination may be largely shaped by the experiences of women from the mainstream population. As a result, even in States that pursue proactive policies of non-discrimination there may be a serious risk that women belonging to certain religious minorities largely fail to benefit from anti-discriminatory measures. When designing programmes to overcome such blind spots, States should also be guided by the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women. 4. Broad application in the spirit of universalism 31. Based on the assumption that all human beings are rights holders in international human rights law, they all deserve respect for their self-understanding in the area of religion or belief. However, given the experience that self-understandings of human beings in questions of religion or belief can be very diverse, freedom of religion or belief must have a broad scope of application and should be implemented in an open and inclusive manner accordingly. This requirement follows from the universalistic nature of human rights. The Human Rights Committee has clarified that article 18 of the International Covenant “protects theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, as well as the right not to profess any religion or belief. The terms “belief” and “religion” are to be broadly construed. Article 18 is not limited in its application to traditional religions or to religions and beliefs with institutional characteristics or practices analogous to those of traditional religions.” 7 32. A broad and inclusive understanding must also guide the interpretation of the rights of persons belonging to religious minorities in the understanding of article 27 of the International Covenant and the 1992 Minorities Declaration. Accordingly, the term “religious minority” should be conceptualized in such a way as to cover all relevant groups of persons, including traditional as well as non-traditional communities, and both large and small communities. One should also take into account the situation of internal minorities, i.e. minority groups within larger minorities. 33. Against a widespread misunderstanding, the Special Rapporteur would like to emphasize that the rights of persons belonging to religious minorities are not antiuniversalistic privileges reserved to the members of certain predefined groups. Rather, all persons de facto living in the situation of a religious or belief minority should be able to fully enjoy their human rights on the basis of non-discrimination and benefit from measures which they may need to develop their individual and communitarian identities. The question of which individuals or groups of individuals fall under the specific guarantees of article 27 of the International Covenant and similar minority rights provisions should be established on the basis of the self-understanding of the persons concerned in conjunction with a transparent empirical assessment of their actual need for promotional measures. 7 CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.4, para. 2. Questions related to the definition of religion or belief were also discussed in the Special Rapporteur’s previous annual report (A/HRC/19/60, paras. 22-73). 9