A/HRC/25/56 disadvantaged minorities. New development goals for the post-2015 period provide an important opportunity to refocus development agendas on inequality and put minority issues at the heart of these efforts. 35. In many national situations, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have not been achieved for disadvantaged minorities. A full analysis of experiences is still needed in order for lessons to be fully learned from the MDG experience. In some countries, positive examples have emerged where practices have been implemented and targeted strategies have produced positive results for minorities. However, a survey by the former Independent Expert on minority issues, Gay McDougall, demonstrated that only a handful of countries devoted particular attention to minorities in their MDG reports, that, even where minorities are mentioned, there is a lack of discussion on how and, crucially, why minorities are experiencing disproportionately high levels of poverty and other serious inequalities, and that women belonging to minority groups remain particularly invisible (see A/HRC/4/9, para. 68). 36. Deficiencies in the MDG framework have been highlighted by minority rights and development experts.7 A reliance on aggregate results and a continuing lack of disaggregated data collection resulted in very few measurements being made of the progress of minority groups towards the goals. Governments have tended to focus attention on populations that are easiest to reach and issues that were easiest and least costly to address. Minorities are often geographically and socially harder to reach and their issues include long-standing discrimination and social exclusion, which are more difficult to address. Strategies consequently often failed to target minorities and their particular challenges, even where the political will to address the issues of minorities existed. 37. Research suggests that minorities and indigenous peoples have progressed at a slower rate and even found gaps between them and other communities widening as others benefited from MDG interventions. An issues brief on promoting equality, including social equity, co-authored by UNICEF, UN-Women, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and OHCHR, stated: “The MDGs, in focusing largely on national averages, without addressing inequalities explicitly, may have led to perverse outcomes whereby already-marginalized groups have tended to be ‘left until last’, thus exacerbating existing inequalities.”8 38. OHCHR and mechanisms and mandates of the Council have consistently emphasized that human rights must be at the heart of development processes and that human rights-based approaches to development, based on the normative framework of human rights law, strengthen development strategies. This message is increasingly being taken up by other stakeholders, including Member States that acknowledge the relationship between human rights and development. It must not be forgotten that human rights include minority rights, as established in article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. 7 8 10 See, for example, Corinne Lennox, “Addressing health inequalities in the post-2015 development framework” in State of the World’s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2013 (London, 2013, Minority Rights Group International), pp. 10 ff. Available from http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/2406TST%20Issues%20Brief%20on%20Pro moting%20Equality_FINAL.pdf.