A/HRC/49/46/Add.1 minimum national standards for voting by mail, make Election Day a federal holiday and restore the requirement that States seek federal approval for changes to their electoral practices that could harm minority voters. At the time of the writing of the present report, however, both pieces of voting-rights legislation, merged into one, have failed to be adopted by the Senate. The right to vote of millions of minorities, already severely curtailed, is increasingly at risk. 33. There are other areas where minorities are not entitled to full and equal human rights in terms of political participation and representation. Millions of citizens in United States territories, most of whom are also members of minorities and some of whom constitute peoples in a colonial context, cannot vote in presidential elections. 17 These citizens are not represented in the Senate and their representatives in the House of Representatives cannot vote on the floor. American Samoans are currently not considered citizens, but “nationals” with even fewer rights in terms of the right to vote and to political representation and participation as expressed in article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The present report cannot provide a detailed account of the various historical factors and the varying forms of autonomy and status, including that of people with the right to selfdetermination, which led to the exclusion of mainly minorities and peoples from overseas territories. The Special Rapporteur is of the view, however, that the prohibition of discrimination in international human rights law and the right to universal and equal voting rights and to take part in the conduct of public affairs through freely chosen representatives are not fully implemented in these territories. Such restrictions are archaic remnants of the colonial past of the United States, which continues through the political disenfranchisement of populations in its overseas territories. V. Education and the linguistic rights of minorities 34. Students belonging to minority groups are often enrolled in public schools in communities with concentrated poverty and therefore have access to fewer resources and educational opportunities, which, too often, are linked to lower educational attainment. More to the point, in some States the budgets of public school district are tied to local property taxes. While somewhat of an oversimplification, since it is not always the case that perstudent expenditures necessarily track community wealth, the general outcome is that public schools in wealthier communities have more local funding. Federal funding reportedly does not make up for this discrepancy. In some parts of the United States there is significant financial support, through taxes and other forms of concessions and transfers, for private education, where minorities tend to be hugely underrepresented. More than one organization pointed out that this could be seen as a form of structural discrimination, akin to a diversion of public resources away from public education, resulting in underfunding of the public school system and the underpayment of public teachers, including a disproportionate impact on mainly minority students. 35. The Special Rapporteur is of the view that there should be national standards for the funding of all public schools to address the inherently systemic and discriminatory impact of locally based funding approaches to public education. There are laudable efforts under the Biden administration to more directly and equitably address these funding inequalities, such as the 2021 American Rescue Plan, which expands opportunities for students most in need, including students from low-income backgrounds and minorities, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which includes federal funding such as Title I, part A (Title I). 36. While States such as California have forms of bilingual education, particularly for its large Hispanic and Latinx minority, as well as some of the larger more concentrated minority communities, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive, this is not necessarily the case for linguistic minorities in other parts of the country. For example, the Cajun minority (also known as “Cadiens” or “Acadiens”), which historically constitutes a significant proportion of the population in the State of Louisiana and parts of neighbouring States, has 17 There are five inhabited American territories: American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands. Their total population in 2020 was around 3.5 million people. 9