A/HRC/7/19 page 4 I. MAIN OBSERVATIONS 1. Efforts to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance are encountering a number of serious major challenges, as manifested by various worrying trends which have been comprehensively analysed by the Special Rapporteur throughout his term of office. 2. The most serious manifestation of the setback in the campaign against racism is the resurgence of racist and xenophobic violence, in particular its most serious expression - a “shift from words to action” - seen in the growing number of acts of physical violence and murders targeting members of ethnic, cultural or religious communities, which the perpetrators - neo-Nazi, nationalist or extreme right-wing groups - openly claim to be motivated by racism and xenophobia. 3. Racist violence is growing in parallel with a worrying new trend which constitutes the most serious threat to democracy and human rights: the political trivialization and democratic legitimization of racism and xenophobia, resulting in particular from the pervasiveness of racist and xenophobic platforms in the political programmes of democratic parties and the ability of the political parties advocating such platforms to apply them through government alliances which ensure their visibility and access to State apparatus. 4. The intellectual legitimization of racism, xenophobia and intolerance is another worrying trend in the current growth of racism and xenophobia, as manifested, inter alia, by the increasing number of so-called scientific or literary works which, on the pretext of protecting national identity and security, develop theories characterized by an ethnic or racial interpretation of social, economic and political problems. Two examples of the trend are: the recent claims that people of African descent are intellectually inferior, made by the Nobel laureate in medicine James Watson, whose underlying desire of establishing a racial hierarchy constitutes a scientific legitimization of historical stereotypes dating from the time when racism first developed and a major setback to promotion the rights of people of African descent; and the speech made by the French President in Dakar on 26 July 2007, which is in line with this move to legitimize racism, through its incredible assertion, reminiscent of the essentialism of the racist constructs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that Africans had not made their mark on history. The invitation of 26 November 2007 extended by the Oxford Union (the Oxford University student debating society) to David Irving, the British negationist and Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, who advocates racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic policies, is also in line with this move towards the intellectual legitimization and trivialization of racism. 5. Political and intellectual tolerance of racism and xenophobia can be seen in the exclusively security-based approach to questions relating to the situation of foreign nationals, in particular immigrants, asylum-seekers and national, ethnic, religious or cultural minorities. In many countries, through an ethnic, repressive and dehumanizing interpretation of their situation, immigrants become the prime target for racism and xenophobia. This was the tone set in a speech by Kevin Andrews, the former Australian Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, who singled out African nationals as a group which had difficulty integrating into Australian society and announced a reduction for 2007-2008 in the quotas for African refugees accepted by