A/HRC/31/72 B. Access to justice for minorities 1. Minorities and law enforcement and policing operations 28. Discrimination against minorities in law enforcement operations can take the form of overpolicing and underpolicing. Overpolicing is often manifested through racial profiling, leading to higher rates of arrest, detention and sentencing. 1 It is often accompanied by the criminalization of social protest by minority groups, which leads to high rates of pre-charge detention and release, a phenomenon not often reflected in official data on criminal processes, when such data is collected.2 29. Underpolicing often occurs where law enforcement authorities fail to take appropriate action in investigating and prosecuting crimes committed against minorities (see sect. C below) and fail to take appropriate action regarding hate speech or hate crimes committed against minorities. Overpolicing and underpolicing remain problematic: contributing to the overrepresentation of minorities in the criminal justice system, while fostering a lack of trust among minorities in criminal justice processes. 30. States should enact legislation explicitly prohibiting and punishing the questioning, searching and arrests of individuals based solely or primarily on their physical appearance, or the perceived membership of an individual as belonging to a minority group, through racial and/or ethnic profiling by law enforcement agencies. 31. States should provide detailed and practical guidance, including through operational protocols, codes of conduct and regulations and training, for all law enforcement officers on how to ensure the impartial and non-discriminatory application of the law and to avoid singling out any particular minority group in police and security operations for all types of crimes. 32. In areas and regions where racial profiling by law-enforcement is prevalent, States should consider introducing community liaison officers including women, or other outreach mechanisms from or with connections to relevant minority communities. Communities should be made aware of the existence of these mechanisms, their right to lodge a complaint and how and where to file complaints. 33. States should develop protocols and codes of conduct for law enforcement agencies for the investigation of hate crimes, including hate speech, incidents and violent crime. Such tools can promote early detection of incidents, helping ensure that situations do not escalate. 34. Minority groups, particularly disadvantaged and stigmatized minorities, may be disproportionately subjected to human rights violations at the hands of law enforcement officers, ranging from pervasive verbal abuse and harassment during public assemblies and overpolicing of minority social protests to use of excessive force, torture and inhuman or degrading treatment during arrest and interrogation, extrajudicial killings and death in custody. States should ensure that rules on the use of force by the police respect general principles of proportionality and necessity in accordance with the Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials and that intentional use of lethal force is restricted to situations where it is unavoidable to save life. The Principles should 1 2 See report on racial and ethnic profiling of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance (A/HRC/29/46). See the report on threats against groups most at risk when exercising assembly and association rights of the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association (A/HRC/26/29). 7