A/HRC/7/19 page 2 Summary This report by the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance is submitted pursuant to Human Rights Council decision 5/1. It examines in greater detail the current worrying trends in racism and xenophobia to which the Special Rapporteur drew attention when introducing his interim report (A/62/306) to the General Assembly at its sixty-second session. The present report should be read in conjunction with the updated report on political platforms which incite or encourage racial discrimination, submitted by the Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council at its fifth session, and his latest report on combating the defamation of religions, submitted to the Council at its sixth session.1 Efforts to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance are encountering a number of serious major challenges manifested by the following worrying trends, details of which are given in this report: erosion of the political will to combat racism and xenophobia, as shown by the non-implementation of the Durban Programme of Action; the resurgence of racist and xenophobic violence; the growing political trivialization of racism and xenophobia, demonstrated by the spread of racist and xenophobic political platforms and by their implementation through government alliances with democratic parties; the ideological, scientific and intellectual legitimization of racist and xenophobic discourse and rhetoric, which favours an ethnic or racial interpretation of social, economic and political problems and immigration; the general increase in manifestations of racial and religious hatred, and also religious intolerance, reflected in particular in manifestations of anti-Semitism and Christianophobia and, more especially, Islamophobia; and the increasing importance in identity constructs of a rejection of diversity and resistance to the process of multiculturalization of societies. The Special Rapporteur devotes a chapter to discrimination based on caste, which he considers to be implicit in his mandate. To reverse these worrying trends, the Special Rapporteur is continuing to promote, in all his activities, the development of a dual strategy: political and legal, on the one hand, aiming to arouse and strengthen the political will of Governments to combat racism and xenophobia and enabling States to acquire the legal and administrative instruments for this purpose, in line with the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action; and cultural, intellectual and ethical, on the other hand, targeting the root causes of those trends, in particular the value systems which legitimize them, the identity constructs - including the writing and teaching of history - which support them, and the rejection of diversity and multiculturalism which sustains them. In 2007, the Special Rapporteur undertook visits to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Dominican Republic and Mauritania. The details of these visits can be found in the addenda to this report (A/HRC/7/19/Add.4, A/HRC/7/19/Add.3, A/HRC/7/19/Add.2, A/HRC/7/19/Add.5 and A/HRC/7/19/Add.6 respectively). 1 A/HRC/5/10 and A/HRC/6/6 respectively.