A/HRC/61/41 reveals a different picture. For example, since the creation of the mandate on minority issues, 921 communications have been sent. Among them, 195 addressees may not be geographically identifiable, as they are addressed to private actors or deal with general issues, 321 concern the Asia and Pacific region (excluding Central Asia and West Asia), 208 concern Europe and Central Asia, and 101 concern West Asia and North Africa, but only 49 concerned sub-Saharan Africa and 47 concerned the Americas. It is, however, worth underlining that, among the communications sent by the mandate holders on minority issues, those relating to the Asia and Pacific region predominantly concern religious minorities, whereas those addressed to European or Central Asian countries mostly refer to national or linguistic minorities. Considering the population distribution between these different geographical areas, there is a slight overrepresentation of Europe and Central Asia, as well as West Asia and North Africa, and a below average number of cases for sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. As regards sub-Saharan Africa, inter-ethnic tensions or conflicts tend to be dismissed as minority issues from a human rights perspective, and are mostly dealt with as a security issue.12 Furthermore, the concept of minority rights remains underdeveloped in political discourse, largely due to its association with some colonial privileges.13 As regards the Americas, decolonization occurred there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – for the benefit of the colonizers. Discrimination based on group belonging is therefore in most situations directed against either Indigenous Peoples or people of African descent scattered through the Americas as a result of the slave trade. Both groups are considered, in the United Nations human rights system, as being in categories of their own, distinct from minorities.14 The fact that persons who are discriminated against because of their belonging to a given group are not qualified as belonging to a minority, or may not even consider themselves a minority, does not exclude that their situation may be considered a minority issue.15 B. Main issues faced by persons belonging to minorities 52. Research has revealed that, contrary to initial intuition, the issues faced by persons belonging to minorities are quite similar wherever they exist, even though they vary in their forms and in the intensity of the harm caused. There are six main issues faced by persons belonging to minorities, which will be examined below, namely, extermination, exclusion, “invisibilization”, discrimination in access to public spaces and services, marginalization, and self-representation and organization. 1. Extermination 53. The extermination of human beings because they belong to a minority may take such forms as physical eradication or deportation or take more subtle forms based on preventing intergenerational transmission of cultural, linguistic or religious elements of minorities’ identities, which lead to the extinction of the minority as a distinct group in the State population. 54. The physical eradication of persons belonging to minorities still happens, in the form of systematic killing or mass violence against them. Examples include the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslim men and boys in 1995, 16 the extermination of Yezidis in 12 13 14 15 16 GE.25-20927 Solomon Dersso, “The African human rights system and the issue of minorities in Africa”, African Journal of International and Comparative Law, vol. 20 No. 1. Tom Brower, “Reframing Kurtz's painting: colonial legacies and minority rights in ethnically divided societies”, Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law, vol. 27. As a consequence, there is, since 2001, a mandate of Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples and, since 2002, a Working Group of Experts on Peoples of African Descent. The Human Rights Committee, in the cases of Poma Poma v. Peru (CCPR/C/95/D/1457/2006) and Ominayak and the Lubicon Lake Band v. Canada, communication No. 167/2006 (see A/45/40, chap. V), in which the authors of the communications were invoking the right to self-determination as “peoples” under article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the definition of which is outside the jurisdiction of the Committee, requalified the claims by Indigenous Peoples as “minority issues” under article 27 of the Covenant. See www.un.org/en/observances/srebrenica-genocide-commemoration-day/about. 7