A/HRC/51/54 84. States should recognize and promote the distinctiveness of children of African descent, including their hair and other expressions of their racial and cultural identity such as dress code, language and music. Inclusive policies and practices may be enhanced by the effective participation of people of African descent. 85. Family policing should be replaced by care and strength-based interventions that support parents, kinship resources and communities and recognize States’ obligation to support the reunification of families. 86. States should recognize their obligation to support children’s right to family life with their parents under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, including by preserving the family structure or making sincere efforts to reunify families separated through legal action or in the name of child protection, in particular where cultural or educational differences are involved. Parents facing investigations, child removals or termination of parental rights should have access to culturally competent, free counsel from the earliest contact with State personnel. Children of African descent should have access to culturally competent law guardians from their own culture as a matter of course in these cases. Policies for the immediate review of removal decisions, including hearings, must be public and available in all languages. Clear, articulated measures for the return of removed children must be available to families. 87. States should regularly collect and analyse data and conduct racial equity audits and impact assessments that publicly examine the use of discretion and the role of systemic racism in the routine operation of systems affecting children, including in the juvenile legal system and the family-regulation system. 88. States should close pathways into the juvenile justice system through the decriminalization of minor offences, including misdemeanours, as well as violations such as truancy, running away, incorrigibility, begging and trespassing, which result from poverty, homelessness, family violence and adolescence. 89. The availability of pre-arrest diversion and alternatives to incarceration should be scrutinized to ensure that the use of discretion does not facilitate racial disparities or discrimination. The outcome of diversion programmes should involve definite and final closure of the case as non-criminal dispositions. 90. Where it cannot credibly be established that children are above the minimum age of criminal liability, they are entitled to the benefit of the doubt and should be held not criminally responsible. Where official documentation (e.g. birth certificate) is absent, authorities should credit available documentation, such as notification of birth, extracts from birth registries, baptismal or equivalent documents and school reports. Documents should be considered genuine in the absence of proof to the contrary. 91. The use of zero-tolerance and “three strikes” approaches, mandatory sentences, trial in adult courts and other primarily punitive measures should be constantly reviewed for their licensing, or denial, of the use of discretion in racially biased ways. 92. States must carefully regulate the use of risk instruments, facial recognition, surveillance, and other artificial intelligence technology, or risk misclassification of people of African descent on the basis of their race. States should ensure that risk assessments do not include policing and justice system data from eras where racial bias was embedded into policies and practices. 93. In order to meaningfully achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, a racialized analysis must acknowledge the historical underpinnings of economic deprivation, loss of present-day value of assets due to enslavement, intergenerational loss of opportunity, present-day exploitation and the inability to self-emancipate due to structures and systems that create negative and deleterious effects on health, education, development and opportunity. 94. States should dismantle discriminatory laws that restrict the bodily autonomy of and limit access to sexual and reproductive health for adolescent girls of African descent, and acknowledge the racialized impact of such policies. Quality services, grounded in culturally appropriate models, should be standardized. 17