A/HRC/7/19/Add.4 page 12 32. The Department of National Minorities and Lithuanians Living Abroad is responsible for the protection of rights of persons belonging to national minorities, safeguarding of their interests, attending to their needs and care for the preservation of national identity and heritage.5 The Department is directly supported by an advisory Council of National Minorities, gathering representatives of some 20 communities, who make recommendations to the Department, the Seimas and the Government as a whole. The Department is also responsible for promoting Lithuanian culture abroad, particularly by supporting activities developed by the Lithuanian diaspora, which has some 1.5 to 2 million members worldwide. 33. Apart from policy consultation, one of the roles of the Department is to provide support, including funding, to initiatives developed by minority communities in Lithuania. A number of cultural centres that promote minority cultures are being supported by the Department around the country. In particular, the Special Rapporteur visited the Roma community centre in the outskirts of Vilnius, the Jewish Tolerance Centre in Vilnius, the Karaïte Society in Trakai and a multicultural centre in Visaginas. In this regard, the Department is designed to promote a predominantly cultural strategy to promote integration and multiculturalism and foster minority cultures, thus complementing the legal measures that have been established to fight racism and discrimination. B. Policies and measures to combat racism and racial discrimination 34. The Government’s approach to national minorities was summarized by the Director of the Department of National Minorities and Lithuanians Living Abroad as an attempt “to build a new Lithuanian State with the minorities that live in Lithuania”. In particular, this Department ruled out any possibility of fostering integration by assimilation, emphasizing the importance of national minorities maintaining and promoting their cultural traditions within a multicultural State. 35. A number of different authorities at the Ministerial level have informed the Special Rapporteur about activities and programmes that are being developed in their particular mandate areas to fight racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. These include actions in the area of education, culture, social security and labour. 36. The Ministry of Education relies on a strategy, based on constitutional requirements, to promote education in the minority language. An explicit policy decision in this regard was that “the mother tongue of minorities should not be relegated to second place”, as expressed by the Minister herself. Under the Law on Education, in municipalities with a substantial national minority, upon the community’s request, education is granted in the minority language. In 2006/07, in terms of language instruction, the number of secondary schools was the following: 64 Polish and 17 Polish-Lithuanian; 44 Russian and 20 Lithuanian-Russian; 13 Polish-Russian schools; 5 Lithuanian-Russian-Polish schools; and 1 Byelorussian. Additionally, there is a Jewish and a German school that combine instruction in Lithuanian with Jewish or German 5 See the State party report, CERD/C/461/Add.2, para. 7.