A/HRC/61/41 United Nations General Assembly Distr.: General 5 January 2026 Original: English Human Rights Council Sixty-first session 23 February–2 April 2026 Agenda item 3 Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development Addressing minority issues through their root causes Report of the Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Nicolas Levrat Summary Acknowledging the specificities of minority issues in each country in which they arise, the Special Rapporteur on minority issues tries to identify what minority issues are in different contexts. He has identified that it is not so much the type of issues faced by persons belonging to minorities that varies from country to country, but rather the root causes that led to the existence of minority issues in a given context. He underlines that most of the understanding of minority issues has been built around the specific root cause of nation-building, generating national minorities. He advocates in his recommendations for an evolution of the approaches to minority issues to tailor concepts and mechanisms to other root causes generating minority issues, such as migration, decolonization, entrenched social hierarchies or non-sedentary populations. The present report also contains an overview of the activities of the Special Rapporteur in 2025. GE.25-20927 (E) 020126 050126