Mr. President,
Excellencies,
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is an honor to be here with you today at this eighth Forum on Minority Issues, I would like to
thank the Independent Expert on minority issues for leading this initiative. The subject of today’s
discussion, addressing the root causes of discrimination, is critical for the improvement of efforts to
eliminate practices in law enforcement and criminal justice systems which constitute violations of
human rights for the individuals and groups targeted by these practices.
It is important to stress that practices such as racial and ethnic profiling are prevalent in everyday
law enforcement systems. As I stated in my latest report to the Human Rights Council, practices
such as the use of stop and frisk, or stop and check, have disproportionately targeted minority
populations who have suffered unequal levels of stops by police forces. . It is all the more pertinent
to address this issue as in a context of increased migration fluxes; official border crossings and hubs
of transportation, have become places where consistent racial and ethnic profiling takes place.
Customs, border, and security agencies routinely subject particular individuals to additional security
checks and interviews. Furthermore, in recent years as States have hardened measures to counter
threats of terrorism, migrants and minority groups have been particularly affected by the adverse
effects of these new law enforcement practices. Moreover, economic crises in various countries
have exacerbated levels of existing discrimination.
The development of new technology that purports to create automatically generated “risk profiles”
for specific ethnic groups, as well as the use of software by law enforcement agencies have
increased concerns that racial and ethnic profiling may become a regularized and permanent fixture
of immigration and border control management systems around the world. Recent violence in
various parts of the world including Paris, have led to such discussion of increasing screening for