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Racial Discrimination and Related Intolerance
We are served refreshment only in separate cups at roadside tea stalls,
turned away from public swimming pools, stopped on highways as presumptive
criminals, trafficked as prostitutes, denied our mother's nationality,
classed willy-nilly as "mentally disabled" in schools, and abducted into
slavery.
We are denied housing or burned out of our homes, refused fresh water from
village wells, barred from employment or forced to perform degrading labor,
and driven out of out of our communities or even our countries by terror.
We face beatings, sexual assault, wrongful arrest, or murder on a daily
basis. In lieu of the birthright of equality we are marked from birth with
the brand of discriminatory treatment.
These words are the distillation of testimony received by Human Rights
Watch that reflect the reality of racism as a global ill. This is the
experience of countless millions who are victims of racial discrimination,
xenophobia, and related intolerance on a daily basis. They include
minorities around the world--and some majority populations too, even in the
post-apartheid era. They have in common their humanity and the denial of
full equality by reason of their birth. They are the victims of the
politics of exclusion, stigmatization, and scapegoating--or of targeted
neglect and social invisibility.
The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination (CERD) defines "racial discrimination" broadly and
concretely. Adopted in 1965, its definition of racial discrimination
includes "any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on
race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or
effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise,
on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the
political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life."
The reality of racism does not turn only on the definition of the groups
that are oppressed, or on the much disputed concept of race itself, but may
be driven largely by the perceptions of the oppressor. Racism blights the
lives of groups defined primarily by ethnicity, caste, or an identity
shaped by religion. Unlike class or other indicators of social status,
these are attributes by which people are instantly identified and which can
not readily be shed. Even if the very idea of race is discounted, racism is
a very real and deadly phenomenon.
The convention on racial discrimination requires states to guarantee to all
individuals the enjoyment of rights without such discrimination--and to
ensure that public policies are discriminatory neither in purpose nor in
effect. In many countries, the discriminatory effect of public policy,
regardless of its intent, serves to lock people away from the exercise of
civil and political rights--and by doing so bars their way to the enjoyment
of economic, social, and cultural rights.
International action to combat |