A/70/335 40. States may also fear that the collection of data may reveal the inefficiency of the measures taken and/or lead to the inevitable allocation of additional funds to anti-discrimination policies. However, the Special Rapporteur would like to emphasize that this is merely a question of accountability and that one of the purposes of collecting data is to ensure such accountability. 41. The Special Rapporteur acknowledges that in highly polarized societies, figures showing evidence of inequalities may revive violence between groups competing for resources. The results of censuses in some countries are barely publicized, as they could represent a dangerous trigger for violent reactions in highly heterogeneous societies where individuals are mobilized on ethnic grounds. However, the Special Rapporteur would like to stress that collecting data is not a cause but rather a diagnosis of situations which are conduciv e to such violent confrontations between groups, who may have accumulated grievances caused by systemic inequalities and discrimination. Those fears should therefore be linked to the failure or unwillingness of States to address inequalities and discrimina tion rather than being imputed to the data itself. The resistance of States to collecting data may in some cases equate to obstructing the right to information, as there is an underlying resistance to documenting the situation of vulnerable or marginalized groups, including ethnic minorities. 42. Historically, population groups that have been discriminated against may also not have been in favour of the collection of that type of data, for fear that it might have the perverse effect of increasing their vulnerability to abuse. The Special Rapporteur acknowledges that specific tragic historical contexts have been a deterrent to the collection of “sensitive data” and have motivated the prohibition on collecting official ethnic data and statistics. The tragedies of ethnic cleansing under Nazi occupation in the Second World War can never be forgotten. Evidence shows that population data collection systems have greatly contributed to the identification of minorities and vulnerable groups, who were subsequently subj ected to large-scale violations, as was the case for Jewish and Gypsy civilians during the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, among others. It has been documented that in the Netherlands, where the highest death rate of Jewish citizens was observed (73 per cent of all Dutch Jews), a comprehensive registration system had been developed for both administrative and statistical purposes prior to the Nazi occupation, whereby individuals were registered and identified by their belonging to a specific ethnic group, as reflected in their identity cards. 9 That was used by the Nazi administration, in complicity with the Dutch population registration authorities, to arrest and deport a large numbers of Jews and Gypsies to extermination camps. In recent history, the genocide in Rwanda was also partly organized on the basis of the existing population registration system inherited from the colonial era, which had been established by the Belgian colonial administration to divide the population into the two categories of Hutus and Tutsis. The production of identity documents, which actually mentioned the ethnic group to which individuals belonged, facilitated the massacre of more than 800,000 Tutsis in four months. 43. Such grave human rights violations provide clear evidence that population data can be misused and turned into dangerous tools. In some instances, false data have also been produced to serve political purposes, for instance to maintain ruling __________________ 9 15-14106 William Seltzer and Margo Anderson, “The dark side of numbers: the role of population data systems in human rights abuses”, Social Research, vol. 68, No. 2 (summer 2001). 13/24