A/73/205 programme of the School of Law of Murdoch University, Australia, on his mandate and activities, as well as challenges pertaining to minority issues. On 16 July, he explained how he and the United Nations interpreted the human rights of minorities to the participants in the sixth Global Minority Rights Summer School, held in Budapest on the theme “Law and politics of minority rights: are norms and institutions failing us?”. C. Annual report to the Human Rights Council for 2017 16. The Special Rapporteur submitted his annual report for 2017 (A/HRC/37/66), which included an outline of the priorities and vision of his tenure as mandate holder on minority issues, to the Human Rights Council at its thirty-seventh session, in March 2018. D. Forum on Minority Issues 17. Information on the tenth session of the Forum on Minority Issues, held on 30 November and 1 December 2017 on the theme “Minority youth: towards diverse and inclusive societies”, can be found in the annual report of the Special Rapporteur for 2017 (ibid., paras. 59–68). 18. The eleventh session of the Forum, which will be focused on statelessness and minorities, will be held in Geneva on 29 and 30 November 2018. III. Statelessness: a minority issue A. Introduction 19. In 2008, the Independent Expert on minority issues presented in her annual report to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/7/23) a thematic assessment of the issue of the discriminatory denial or deprivation of citizenship as a tool for the exclusion of minorities. A decade later, in her report to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/38/52), the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance also addressed the issue of racial discrimination in the context of laws, policies and practices concerning citizenship, nationality and immigration status. 20. Both mandate holders made important contributions to advancing the understanding of the root causes of statelessness, in particular the frequent presence of discriminatory practices, in breach of international human rights obligations, that result in patterns of statelessness affecting, in particular, minorities around the world. What was not known in 2008 or perhaps emphasized sufficiently in 2018 is the extent to which statelessness is, first and foremost, a minority issue. 21. The vast majority of stateless populations today — more than three quarters, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2017 — are persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. 3 This massive overrepresentation is no coincidence: patterns regarding the statelessness of minorities clearly suggest that the denial or deprivation of citizenship is too often neither entirely arbitrary nor accidental, but rather, for many millions of people, the result of deliberate policies and practices that render too many __________________ 3 6/19 UNHCR, “‘This is our home’: stateless minorities and their search for citizenship ”, 2017 Statelessness Report (November 2017), p. 1. 18-12048