Most important, were the opportunities that the country visits gave me to inter-act directly with minority communities. Often that meant traveling far outside of the major urban centers, to areas where infrastructure was poor to non-existent. That is where the promise of the Declaration was most meaningful. In addition to the country visits the Mandate offers fruitful opportunities to coordinate work with other mechanisms like the treaty bodies. Most frequently, I coordinated with CERD. On one occasion, when a country had failed to submit its periodic reports to CERD for 16 years, and where there had been events of great concern that fell within my mandate and the provisions of ICERD, I was able to conduct a country visit to investigate the events in person and report my findings confidentially to CERD prior to their reviewing the country situation under their own procedures. My findings also informed a communication to the concerned government from the Secretary General’s Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities. This all led to the country renewing its commitment to meet its reporting obligations to CERD in the future. The country visits also afforded the opportunity to interact with the UN Country teams and to bring to their attention how the Declaration could be and should be integrated into their daily operations at the national level. In countries like Colombia, in which the issues covered by the Declaration are very prominent and the High Commissioner has a substantial number of staff throughout the country, the ground support for the mandate was extensive and the follow-up between the mandate and the country team was ongoing and extremely fruitful. The work I undertook with UN specialized agencies was particularly productive. In May 2006, I initiated and held a high-level constructive dialogue with the UNDP senior management to highlight the impact and negative consequences of long-standing discrimination, exclusion, and denial of basics rights and fundamental freedoms on minorities in development processes. We explored what specific and sustained approaches could be adopted by UNDP, as the main development partner of governments, to ensure that the unique circumstances of minorities are further embedded in its policy, programming, advocacy, and capacity development initiatives. 4