A/HRC/54/71 and lived experience. Support and opportunities are needed to strengthen these platforms and to support the initiatives that arise from these discussions. 91. The Working Group’s follow-on activities, including follow-up country visits, have uncovered evidence of the persistence of significant human rights abuses and violations, including where previously identified by the Working Group as systemic contributions to racial discrimination, disparity and injustice. In some States, demonstration projects targeting racial equality or police impunity that had been highlighted previously to the Working Group were later represented as new initiatives, although they had remained largely unchanged over the course of a decade or more. In others, anti-racism initiatives had failed to meaningfully include or support people of African descent, whose lived experience and expertise would have provided important insights into impact, credibility and legitimacy. Still others cited current events or complexity or mobilized the culture of denial to defend conduct that was clearly associated with persistent racial disparity and injustice. The Working Group calls upon all stakeholders and Member States to actualize commitments to racial equality and equity. It stands ready to provide technical assistance and engagement upon request. 92. The Working Group has observed a reduction in and retrenchment of racial equality and justice for people of African descent in some countries, often masked by investments in communications strategies rather than in communities. Thus, while the country visits have contributed to increased awareness, accountability and policy changes internationally, a sense of complacency has limited both the impact of the mandate and the capacity of Member States to adequately leverage the recommendations of the Working Group or the lived experience and expertise of their own people, compromising their commitments to racial equity and equality. 93. Today, the visibility, prioritization and funding of key human rights initiatives leverage the legitimacy of data-driven, evidence-based norms. The Working Group has focused on two key issues in this regard. First, the startling dismissal of qualitative data and individual narratives flattens and distorts the reality of people of African descent so that it fits easily observable conclusions evident in large data sets. Data disaggregated by race is touted as the gold standard for visibility regarding the issues facing people of African descent and yet the proper understanding, interpretation and monitoring of data-driven initiatives, even when data are disaggregated by race, also require significant investments in qualitative data, including anecdotal and narrative data. These include everyday experience and information connecting human rights violations to intersectional populations, which might disappear within the quantitative data, for example, the high rates of State and non-State violence against transgender women and gender-diverse persons of African descent, including in health-care spaces. 94. Second, the Working Group has confronted many States that eschew the collection of data disaggregated by race, citing privacy, universalism, the legacy of the Second World War or other concerns, yet such States maintain and publish data on gender, which is equally a social construct. They fail to engage the discourse on protections that could mitigate such concerns, including self-identification and modern data-privacy provisions. They also fail to confront how a lack of data disaggregated by race obscures the ways in which racial bias and profiling drive police impunity, harassment and violence. The Working Group has observed no State initiative, policy or practice that is not informed by racially disaggregated data that adequately addresses the erasure of the racialized nature of human rights abuses and violations evident in their populations at scale. States could fail to achieve human rights targets without racially disaggregated data based on the principle of self-identification to illustrate areas of ongoing concern, show trajectories of improvement over time and enable racial disparities to drive efforts at remediation and redress. 95. The Working Group calls upon Member States to confront the role of racial bias and systemic racism in the disproportionate surveillance, stop-and-search and harassment of people of African descent across regions and in the overrepresentation of people of African descent under social control, whether incarceration, probation or other situations. In some States, including global super-Powers that export policing expertise, the legacies of colonialism and the trade and trafficking in enslaved Africans GE.23-15301 19