A/74/160 regional and international organizations, including the Office the United Nations High Commissioner for Human for Human Rights (OHCHR), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Council of Europe, and civil society, as well as leading experts on education and language, contributed to the thematic discussions. On 9 May 2019, he was a keynote speaker at the World Council of Churches ecumenical strategic forum on racism, xenophobia and racial discrimination, held at the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey near Geneva. On 27 May 2019, the Special Rapporteur was a panellist at Deutsche Welle’s Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany. The panel was organized by former fellows of the OHCHR Minorities Fellowship Programme and was entitled “Shifting powers: giving microphones to minorities”. The Special Rapporteur addressed the need to deconstruct how minorities are portrayed in social media, and particularly the danger of their voices being overwhelmed and threatened by the rising tides of hate speech and false information. 17. From 8 to 10 June 2019, the Special Rapporteur organized an expert workshop in Galway, Ireland, which brought together a group of leading experts on statelessness. The workshop addressed the root causes of statelessness around the world and its disproportionate impact on persons belonging to minorities, and discussed practical recommendations to effectively respond to the issue of deprivation or denial of citizenship. Following this workshop, and on the basis of his reports to the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, and on the recommendations of the Forum on Minority Issues at its eleventh session, the Special Rapporteur will develop a practical guide on how to address the growing challenge of the statelessness of minorities. On 18 June 2019, the Special Rapporteur addressed the high -level meeting on the theme “A perspective to a future strategy to prevent and fight anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, radicalization and hate speech”, held in Bucharest under the auspices of the Prime Minister of Romania and co-organized with the World Jewish Congress. In his address, the Special Rapporteur explained why minorities were the main targets of hate speech around the world and emphasized that preventing and combating hate speech, and especially anti-Semitism, required finding a difficult but necessary balance between freedom of expression and prohibition of hate speech and incitement to violence. He echoed the message of the Secretary -General that hate speech was spreading like wildfire through social media and constituted a menace to democratic values, social stability and peace. On 24 June, he gave a series of lectures at the Aix-Marseille Université summer school on the practice of human rights, in Aix-en-Provence, France, with a particular focus on current human rights challenges, including the issue of hate speech and incitement to hatred against minorities through social media. On 25 June 2019, he gave the closing speech of the first day of the sixth annual conference of the International Association of Language Commissioners in Toronto, Canada. The theme of the conference was “Protecting linguistic minorities, building stronger societies”, and the Special Rapporteur spoke on how inclusive societies needed to reflect and accommodate language diversity, in line with relevant human rights principles for linguistic minorities, such as the prohibition of discrimination on the ground of language, and the important role that language commissioners could play in that regard. On 27 June 2019, the Special Rapporteur was invited to participate in the World Conference on Statelessness, organiz ed by the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, in The Hague, the Netherlands. In his presentation, the Special Rapporteur framed statelessness as a minority issue and referred to the risk of an explosive increase in the number of stateless people glob ally owing to policy and legislative developments, such as those in Assam, India, where millions faced the threat of being deemed “foreigners” and treated as non-citizens, and could therefore become stateless if unable to demonstrate any form of citizenshi p. He warned of a grave situation which could eventually create the conditions not only 19-11967 7/19