A/HRC/7/36 page 9 Item 5 (a) (iv): Racism and employment 48. Mr. Patrick Taran, panellist for the Working Group on People of African Descent, made his presentation on racism and employment. Mr. Taran provided a detailed analysis on the necessity of work. A job, with decent conditions, was central to everyone’s participation in society, to their independence, self-reliance, identity and dignity. He stated that unemployment was a generator of social exclusion, personal destabilization, deconstruction of identity and dignity. Racism was seen essentially as a construct elaborated to justify exploitation, slavery and socio-economic stratification. The differentiated characterization of groups according to physical and presumed intellectual and social characteristics served to organize and justify different treatment in the world of work. Race and employment remained intimately intertwined in today’s globalized capitalist economic order. The realm of employment was a major arena for action and for the empowerment of communities, notably for people of African descent. 49. There was commentary on the need to accumulate relevant statistics in order to effectively gauge the real advances that the international system had made in combating racism and unemployment. 50. Comment was made regarding the situation of people of African descent with regard to the informal employment sector. Several members stressed the fact that most of International Labour Organization provisions failed to take into account the need to provide adequate support and assurance of good working conditions and working entitlements for people in the informal working sector, where the majority were people of African descent. 51. Domestic workers in South America were highlighted as a specific section of the informal sector that enjoyed few of the benefits normally attributed to people in the informal sector, even though it was a very large employer not only of people of African descent but also a large number of other races in South America. 52. In conjoining the twin themes of access to education and racism and employment, an observation was made that most of those affected in both instances were already living in poverty and thus did not themselves have the tools to redress that poverty. Solutions to that situation had to be created, otherwise those problems would continue to persist. It was mentioned that advances had been made, but that appropriate enforcement was lacking. Item 5 (a) (v): Racism and health 53. Dr. Christina Torres, regional adviser of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), delivered her presentation on racism and health. Her paper reiterated the requirements of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action with regard to health and its relevance to people of African descent. In highlighting all the articles relevant to people of African descent, she stressed that there was a need to collect systematic and disaggregated data regarding the health situation of people of African descent. She highlighted the advancement of projects in Latin America that had been implemented post-Durban to assist in combating discrimination in areas of health, including the project by the Special Secretary for the Promotion of Racial Equality in Brazil. She also stressed her organization’s creation of a new gender and ethnicity unit, requested in paragraph 154 of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, to promote and develop activities for the identification of the impact of discrimination on health