A/HRC/46/30 rights of all persons regardless of religious or belief identity must oppose religious bigotry and racism, but they must also avoid censoring purely discursive speech.207 Still, recognizing that both conscious and unconscious bias directed against Muslims can play a significant role in dehumanizing Muslim individuals and communities and in motivating discrimination, hostility and violence against them is critical to addressing the systematic structures and social norms within which such bias is normalized. Therefore, it is essential to identify and evaluate how State structures perpetuate and legitimize Islamophobia and actively discriminate against Muslim individuals and communities. Moreover, discrimination, hostility and violence against actual or perceived Muslims is often intersectional, with religion-based discrimination intersecting with or compounding discrimination based on nationality, gender or racial or ethnic background, among other protected characteristics. Muslims are frequently targeted for certain visible “Muslim” characteristics, such as their skin colour and religious attire, including headscarves, and because of their names. 208 Muslim women may face a triple penalty for being women, belonging to a minority ethnic community and for being Muslim.209 Islamophobia infringes on the rights to freedom of religion or belief and nondiscrimination where it influences policies and practices related to immigration, policing, employment, education and housing, among others. The obstacles created in both the public and the private spheres often make it difficult for a Muslim to be a Muslim. The totality of this experience, in some contexts, may amount to coercion of such a level as to be prohibited by article 18 (2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as detailed in paragraph 5 of the Human Rights Committee’s general comment No. 22 (1993), in which the Committee condemns policies and practices that have the effect of violating that standard. VI. Recommendations The Special Rapporteur recognizes that a working definition of Islamophobia can offer practical guidance for identifying Islamophobia in its various forms and therefore encourages stakeholders to undertake an inclusive process, involving a diverse group of stakeholders that also represent minority communities, to develop and endorse a non-legal tool for use in education, in awareness-raising and for monitoring and responding to manifestations of Islamophobia. Such a tool must be in line with approaches to hate speech taken by the Human Rights Committee, the Rabat Plan of Action and general recommendation No. 35 (2013) of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to ensure that any definition is accompanied by clear guidance on the obligation to defend freedom of expression within the law for all. In this regard, the Special Rapporteur notes that criticism of Islam is not Islamophobic unless it is accompanied by hatred or bias towards Muslims in general. Moreover, in order to address and mitigate the impacts of Islamophobia, the Special Rapporteur makes the recommendations set out below. States should: (a) Repeal all restrictions on the absolute freedom of belief in the forum internum and repeal discriminatory restrictions on the right to manifest one’s religion or belief in the forum externum; (b) Take all measures necessary to combat direct and indirect forms of discrimination against Muslims, whether at the national, regional or local levels, particularly recalling that such discrimination is often intersectional, being based concurrently on religion or belief, race, ethnicity, gender and other protected characteristics. This includes taking steps to eliminate discrimination in the fields of employment, education, access to justice, adequate housing, health care and 207 208 209 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3355274. https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2017/second-european-union-minorities-and-discriminationsurvey-muslims-selected, p. 9. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmwomeq/89/89.pdf, p. 15. 21