Presentation to UN Minority Forum 2016, Palais Nations, Geneva. Protecting minorities during humanitarian crisis. By Dr. Farah Mihlar. 1. Thank you Mr. Chairman. I am very grateful to be here to make this presentation and I would like to thank the Special Rapporteur for her invitation and her colleagues at OHCHR for enabling this visit. 2. My presentation will primarily draw from my experience having worked on Sri Lanka, during a humanitarian crisis in early 2009, at the end of the country’s three-decade armed conflict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who were fighting government forces for a separate homeland for ethnic minority Tamils. Tamils are Sri Lanka's largest minority of about 18 percent. During the course of the conflict minorities have faced other humanitarian crisis, including the forcible eviction of the entire Muslim population from the north of Sri Lanka by Tamil militants in 1990; and after the South Asian Tsunami in 2004. 3. I want to focus my presentation on human rights protection of minorities in conflict induced humanitarian crisis. 4. When a humanitarian crisis is caused by targeted attacks on a minority population, or when the rights of minorities are violated during a humanitarian crisis, what protection exists for them? 5. In increasingly securitised environments where minorities are frequently portrayed as the ‘other’ and seen as ‘terrorists’ or the ‘enemy’ how can their rights be protected? It is not uncommon during a crisis for special security laws to be imposed, superseding national laws, and used by state authorities to target rights of minorities. Civil space also becomes limited, minority activists come are attacked, threatened, intimidated or referred to as ‘traitors’ and agents of terror groups’ and thereby de-legitimised. 6. In the last stages of the Sri Lankan armed conflict up to 300,000 civilians were trapped in fighting; targeted in shell and bomb attacks by the Sri Lankan military and