Laura Ronkainen – JIPS 25 November 2016 Forum on Minority Issues Mr. Chair, Madame Special Rapporteur, ladies and gentlemen. The need to take into consideration the specific situations of minorities in humanitarian crises is a fact, and already stated many times on this forum. Minority groups often face intersectional vulnerabilities that can enforce the negative impacts of crisis on them, restrict their access to or exclude them from assistance, and hinder the process of recovery. At the same time, humanitarian actors, faced with more and more dire needs and limited resources, aim to target their assistance to the most vulnerable. Standardized vulnerability criteria that assume same vulnerabilities are cross cutting from context to context, often overlook the specific vulnerabilities that minority groups may face, and that are further exacerbated by conflict or disaster. Fully understanding the diverse characteristics of populations affected by a crisis is crucial for humanitarian response to be effective in the immediate crisis, as well as for inclusive recovery and peace building processes.  I represent the Joint IDP Profiling Service (JIPS), an interagency service that supports governments, humanitarian and development actors on profiling – collaborative data collection and analysis in displacement situations to inform evidence-based response. JIPS is honored to be part of the panel to discuss these important issues, although when preparing for this presentation we also realized how scarce concrete good practice on obtaining disaggregated data on minorities in humanitarian situations is.  This data gap exists because actors often do not think about this need amidst a humanitarian crisis, and consequently data systems are not sensitive enough to capture minorities. Secondly, data gaps also exist because this is not an easy topic to collect data on. For example, when supporting displacement profiling exercises to inform national responses, strategy or policy development processes in different displacement contexts, it is almost invariably recognized that understanding the linkages of displacement and different diversity characteristics such as clan, religion or ethnicity are crucial for supporting comprehensive durable solutions to displacement. However, explicitly and adequately collecting data on these characteristics is almost always avoided in order not to further aggravate existing tensions, or not to discourage certain stakeholders or minority groups