A/58/255 III. Cooperation and coordination among United Nations programmes and agencies, including relevant regional organizations 10. The United Nations and the international community, including regional organizations, have been paying greater attention to the protection and promotion of minorities. With a view to enhancing the cooperation and coordination on minority issues, the Economic and Social Council, in its decision 2000/269, endorsed Commission on Human Rights resolution 2000/52, requesting the organization of an international seminar on this subject. Subsequently, the International Seminar on Cooperation for the Better Protection of the Rights of Minorities was organized by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Durban, South Africa, on 1, 2 and 5 September 2001. Prior to the Durban seminar, a preparatory meeting on the theme “Tackling poverty and discrimination: mainstreaming minority rights in development assistance” was held in July 2001 in London and was attended by over 50 representatives of United Nations bodies and the Working Group on Minorities, multilateral and bilateral development agencies, international non-governmental organizations and community-based minority rights organizations. The recommendations of that meeting were adopted by the Durban seminar. 11. A wide range of representatives of United Nations specialized agencies, human rights treaty bodies, special procedures, international financial institutions, regional human rights mechanisms and national institutions participated in the seminar in Durban. Participants expressed the view that marginalized minority groups required special measures for the protection of their rights and supported the view that the effective participation of minorities in development processes at all stages, from design, implementation to evaluation and benefit-sharing, was essential. At the ninth session of the Working Group in 2003, participants stated that minorities were globally among the poorest of the poor; they therefore should benefit from progress towards the Millennium Developments Goals achieved by Governments and the international community. They called for greater efforts to be made to ensure that minorities benefit fairly from development. To that end, the mainstreaming of minority rights in the implementation of the Goals is extremely important so as to offer benefits to minorities and create more effective and sustainable programmes for fulfilling these goals. 12. The strengthening of cooperation within United Nations treaty bodies and special procedures of the Commission on Human Rights was extensively discussed at the international seminar in Durban and a set of recommendations adopted in this regard. One of the recommendations encouraged those bodies to examine in greater depth the nature, extent and dynamics of discrimination against minorities, and to urge States to collect disaggregated data on gender and ethnicity, thereby facilitating the possibility of assessing the level of enjoyment of human rights by different groups. The participants also recommended institutionalizing cooperation with regional organizations and national human rights institutions to improve the followup recommendations by treaty bodies and special procedures. In addition, recommendations supported the systematic sharing of information on best practices and lessons to be learned from the cooperation instituted. The full report of the seminar is contained in document E/CN.4/2002/92. 6