A/HRC/37/66 key challenges in terms of access to education and health services. Roma communities in the region also continued to face challenges in accessing adequate housing. Roma who continued to maintain a travelling lifestyle had difficulties in finding adequate sites to set up camp, which could lead to discrimination by the authorities and eviction from camps. Furthermore, the inability to maintain cultural patterns of travelling was having a profoundly negative impact on Roma social and cultural patterns and means of subsistence across the region. For the large proportion of Roma communities in the Americas who no longer travelled, families often lived in situations of extreme poverty, lacking electricity, potable water and adequate sanitation. 21. The workshop addressed ways in which Roma communities could access regional and international human rights protection mechanisms to ensure systematic and continued engagement with the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on minority issues, as well as with other thematic mandates and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. 22. In his concluding remarks to the workshop, the Special Rapporteur encouraged the adoption of strategies and laws at the national level to eradicate discriminatory practices against Roma individuals and communities and to ensure that they had adequate access to health care, social services, employment and education. He also encouraged the promotion of communication amongst Roma rights organizations in other countries in the region and beyond, in order to enhance cooperation and synergies. 23. The participants in the workshop agreed to a number of action points and measures to promote and protect the rights of members of Roma communities in the Americas. Some of the action points submitted to the Special Rapporteur by the participants were as follows: (a) Promotion of the implementation of International Labour Organization (ILO) Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169) and recognition of Roma as an ethnic group; (b) The importance of regular visits by the Special Rapporteur to countries where Roma communities are present and face challenges; (c) The need to continue advocating for public policies aimed at improving the living conditions of Roma in the Americas and the rest of the world; (d) Articulation of plans with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/World Health Organization (WHO) in order to ensure the inclusion of Roma in national health systems; (e) housing; Promotion of public policies on the full enjoyment of the right to adequate (f) The need to devise strategies to strengthen the participation of members of Roma communities in all areas affecting them, including through civil society organizations working specifically on the protection and promotion of their rights. 24. On 5 October 2017, the Special Rapporteur addressed the biannual meeting of the Association des ombudsmans et médiateurs de la francophonie, in Fredericton, Canada, with a presentation entitled “Minorités, droits linguistiques et droits humains: enjeux pour les Nations Unies et la Francophonie”. He described the close links between the human rights of minorities and linguistic rights and emphasized the close relationship between prohibition of discrimination in education and access to services such as health care, and how this could lead to obligations, based on human rights standards, to use or provide services in indigenous languages in certain contexts. 25. On 24 October 2017, the Special Rapporteur participated as a speaker in a side event to the seventy-second session of the General Assembly, in New York. The event was cohosted by the Permanent Mission of Austria, the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Slovenia and the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations in New York, Minority Rights Group International and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Declaration on the Rights of Minorities. The event underscored the urgency of the effective implementation of the Declaration and the protection of the rights of minorities worldwide, especially in the current context of heightened global challenges such as conflicts, 6