A/HRC/61/41 centres, have faced burdensome registration procedures and differential treatment in recent legislation. In China, all religious groups are required to register through State-controlled “patriotic” religious associations; communities that refuse to do so are denied legal status, criminalized and subjected to surveillance and the closure of places of worship, and their members are placed in detention.58 73. Discriminatory fiscal treatment of civil society organizations that allow for religious minorities to exert collectively their rights is also problematic. In several countries, recognized or majority religions benefit from tax exemptions, public subsidies or State funding for clergy salaries and religious infrastructure, while minority religions are excluded from such schemes or subject to additional financial burdens. In numerous European States, religious minority communities lack the legal status to benefit from tax exemptions or the public funding available to established churches, placing them at a structural disadvantage. Identically, the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, in India infringes the capacity of Muslim communities to own and operate places of worship.59 C. Root causes of minority issues 74. The Special Rapporteur highlights with the present study that it is the root causes generating minority issues that differ, rather than the issues themselves. The root causes of minority issues are not the same in Africa as in the Americas, the Caribbean, Asia, Europe or the Pacific region. The root causes are the historical and contextual elements that led some groups within the population of a given State to be in a minority situation. The first historically identified root cause is linked to nation-building. Initially considered as a European issue that emerged in the first part of the twentieth century, nation-building has been (and is still) taking place in many parts of the world and is still creating or exacerbating minority issues. A second root cause generating minority issues is the displacement of populations, whatever the reason for such displacement. A third cause, which is not without links in specific situations with the two first causes, is decolonization. A fourth cause is the existence and the perpetuation of deeply embedded discriminatory social hierarchies. Another enduring root cause of minority issues is the existence of non-sedentary populations within sedentary societies. 1. Nation-building 75. Nation-building describes the process through which a people realizes their right to self-determination by building a democratic State, in which the holder of sovereignty is the people, that is the nation.60 Such processes largely took place in Europe in the nineteenth century and after the First World War.61 National States were built on the specificities that defined the nation of each given State, including emphasizing what distinguished its population from neighbouring nations. As a result, the inhabitants of the State territory who did not share the national characteristic of the dominant national group became “national minorities”. 76. The specificities of nation-building in decolonization processes are addressed below. Except for some rare States that proclaim themselves multinational (such as the Plurinational State of Bolivia), most State nation-building leads to discrimination against minority groups. For example, China has since 2012 undertaken a nation-building process (to complement or replace the ideological foundations of the Chinese State under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party) which has as an effect, despite constitutional provisions, the 58 59 60 61 GE.25-20927 See www.chinasource.org/resource-library/blog-entries/the-2023-regulations-for-religious-activitysite-registration/. See https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=30319. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 2003). On 11 June 1918, President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson stated: “National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent.” 13