A/HRC/40/30 73. In a public statement upon conclusion of his official visit to Botswana in August 2018, the Special Rapporteur on minority issues pointed out that minorities living in remote areas faced significant difficulties in accessing education. He recommended that the Government of Botswana review policies that prevented the teaching of minority languages and teaching in minority languages in both public and private schools.33 74. Several human rights treaty bodies addressed the situation faced by linguistic minority groups. For example, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that States include national languages in their education systems for children who wished to be taught in those languages, and ensure that the use of a particular language did not lead to the exclusion of the group concerned. 34 K. Human rights defenders 75. As custodian agency for indicator 16.10.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals, OHCHR provided, for the first time, global data on the killing of human rights defenders in the report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations on progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (E/2018/64). The report showed that at least one human rights defender had been killed every day since 2015. Among the victims were minority rights advocates. 76. In May 2018, the OHCHR Regional Office for Central Asia organized a regional human rights defenders security platform meeting, gathering nearly 100 human rights defenders from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in cooperation with the Kazakh NGO Kadyr-Kassiyet (“Dignity”) and with support from international and human rights organizations. Together with the Assistant Secretary-General, human rights defenders and security experts, the participants discussed key issues faced by human rights defenders in Central Asia, including threats faced by organizations working with minority groups such as ethnic minorities. 77. At the country level, Afro-Colombian organizations supported the preparations for the universal periodic review of Colombia held in May 2018, during which they highlighted the critical security situation of human rights defenders. They reported that between the signing of the peace agreement in November 2016 and May 2018, approximately 282 human rights defenders had been killed. Antioquia, Cauca, Choco, Nariño, Putamayo and Valle del Cauca were among the departments worst affected by that kind of violence and, coincidentally, among the departments with the highest percentage of ethnic communities. 78. During 2018, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern over the increasing number of incidents of harassment faced by civil society organizations, human rights defenders and journalists, including those monitoring and reporting on the situation of ethnic minorities, rendering the environment within which they operated hostile.35 III. United Nations network on racial discrimination and protection of minorities 79. During the reporting period, as coordinator of the network, OHCHR published a guidance tool on descent-based discrimination.36 In April 2018, it organized, in collaboration with the International Movement against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism, a subregional consultation in Japan on strengthening strategies to combat castebased and analogous forms of discrimination. The guidance tool, which had been translated into Japanese, served as a guide on how best to tackle exclusion based on ancestry. A 33 34 35 36 See www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23471&LangID=E. See, for example, CERD/C/MRT/CO/8-14, para. 18. See, for example, CERD/C/KGZ/CO/8-10. OHCHR, “Guidance tool on descent-based discrimination: key challenges and strategic approaches to combat caste-based and analogous forms of discrimination” (2017). 15