PROTECTING MINORITY RIGHTS – A Practical Guide to Developing Comprehensive Anti-Discrimination Legislation Anti-discrimination laws in a changing world While States’ commitment to realizing the right to non-discrimination is decades old, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has cast a harsh new light on the problems of inequality and discrimination and given renewed urgency to efforts to address them. The pandemic has revealed deep inequalities within our societies, as State responses in the delivery of health care, in the implementation of lockdown measures and in policies designed to mitigate economic impacts have had disproportionate and discriminatory impacts.14 The Frontier Dialogue on addressing structural racial and ethnicity-based discrimination through COVID-19 recovery plans, for example, found that where disaggregated data were available, they showed that rates of COVID‑19 morbidity and mortality were significantly higher among ethnic groups experiencing discrimination. It cited data from countries such as the United States of America, which revealed that the disparate effect of the virus on African Americans was in part a function of structural discrimination and inequalities, including their disproportionate role as frontline essential workers, lower access to health insurance, poorer health service coverage in certain geographical areas and unconscious bias among health providers.15 Elsewhere, studies by civil society organizations have identified myriad discriminatory impacts arising from responses to the pandemic, ranging from the disproportionate impacts of layoffs on women workers in Paraguay,16 to failures to accommodate the needs of children with disabilities and speakers of minority languages in remote education programmes in Kyrgyzstan.17 The pandemic is not the only significant change that underlines the need for a renewed focus on addressing discrimination. Technological developments ranging from the dramatic advances in the speed and availability of information online to the increasing use of artificial intelligence and machine learning pose new discriminatory risks and threats. The human rights impacts of climate change are already disproportionately affecting minority communities and other marginalized persons and groups, as a result of both historic inequalities and contemporary discriminatory policies and practices. What is more, while some of the discriminatory impacts of these trends – and States’ responses to them – are already in evidence, the full range of potentially discriminatory impacts remains to be seen. These and other developments give new urgency to decades-long efforts to protect and realize the right to nondiscrimination and demonstrate the need for States to use equality impact assessment to identify and eliminate the discriminatory impacts of their laws, policies and practices. They reinforce the need for the enactment and implementation of comprehensive anti-discrimination laws. Ultimately, while inequality manifests itself in different ways and arises as a result of different social, economic and political forces, any effort to address inequality requires the elimination of discrimination. Societies that fail to address discrimination – effectively and comprehensively – will never be equal and so will continue to experience the individual and social harms of inequality. Thus, if we aspire to create societies in which all are free and equal in dignity and rights, and where no one is left behind, the adoption of comprehensive antidiscrimination laws is, simply, a necessity. The present guide is designed to assist anyone setting out on this road to greater equality. xxvi 14 Equal Rights Trust and others, “Call to action: addressing discrimination and inequality in the global response to COVID-19” (2020). Available at www.equalrightstrust.org/sites/default/files/images/COVIDResponse.pdf. 15 International Labour Organization, Addendum to the 2020 General Survey: Promoting Employment and Decent Work in a Changing Landscape (Geneva, 2021), para. 226. 16 Kuña Roga and Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (Paraguay), March 2021 (on file with the Equal Rights Trust). 17 Institute for Youth Development of Kyrgyzstan, March 2021 (on file with the Equal Rights Trust).