incarceration processes. Moreover, our experience demonstrates clearly that this is true whether we are speaking of the adult, or child belonging to a minority group. This experience has been gleaned from a variety of interventions, from petitions, site visits and hearings, more recently targeted hearings on Racism, including Race and the Criminal Justice system promoted by the Rapporteurship on the Rights of African Descendants and against Discrimination, whereby we gathered important information from civil society organisations and states. It has invoked the launch of a special report on the criminal justice system and race in the US, focusing on policing and was also interrogated by the IACHR’s Rapporteur at two special fora in Canada on race and rights (Montreal 2013 and Toronto 2014). Racial discrimination in the criminal justice system and policing is certainly a microcosm of the wider societal problem. It is neither isolated not exceptionalistic. Legal Framework only superficially cradles equality While I concede that our legal frameworks conceptualise general principles of equality, in many cases, it cradles equality only superficially. This is so whether we examine how laws are interpreted (for example, Stand your Ground laws), the kinds of laws or penalties that we choose to implement in the criminal justice system, e.g. which offences attract criminal penalties and which do not (such as loitering, a remnant of slave plantation societies), or how laws are applied unequally in ways that disproportionately and unfairly impact minorities. Some of these are fairly well known, but there are some surprising findings: For example, in a recent site Rapporteurship visit to the US on this subject, I discovered an intriguing link between excessive racial profiling of Afrodescendants (which we are familiar with)