Ambedkar International Mission, Australia Thank you Madame Chair. Honorable Chair and Excellencies, I rise today to make an intervention on the rights of the communities discriminated based on caste and descent in the diaspora. There are 280 million individuals globally who belong to these communities, including Dalits, the Roma, Haratin, and Quilombola. They continue to face discrimination, social stratification on the discriminatory principle of [inaudible]. Honorable Chair, caste and descent-based discrimination is a lived reality of millions around the world, and not only in the geographical location of the origin of these practices. As new emerging evidence-based empirical studies have indicated, such discrimination migrates with the diaspora population to the foreign lands. The Australian Human Rights Commission recognizes caste discrimination as a form of intersectional racial discrimination in its National Anti-Racism Framework 2024. This development was an outcome of grass-roots minority engagement and research in the empirical base report, “Caste in Australia: A Phenomenology of Casteism”. This document gave evidence of caste discrimination, which is systemic and pervasive in all aspects of life. With some member states continuing to deny the existence of caste discrimination in the diaspora globally, we the caste-oppressed community members from Australia and around the world have a question for the panel. Could you please share best practices and strategies for enabling evidencebased empirical reporting on caste and descent discrimination to inform future policies and legal reforms across the world. I thank you.