On 21 March, we mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It was proclaimed in 1966, six years after the police in Sharpeville, South Africa killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration against the apartheid "pass laws". Since then, apartheid in South Africa has been dismantled and a set of international norms were adopted to reaffirm that human rights and fundamental freedoms are inherent to all human beings equally. 

Despite the progress we made in creating frameworks that prohibit racial discrimination and in establishing monitoring and accountability mechanisms, racism is still prevalent and widespread. Racism manifests in many actions or precisely in the lack of actions. It starts with settling with the convenience of ignorance when one rejects the existence of racism or denies the detrimental impacts of racism on progress and development. Racism also hides behind deliberate policies which drive members of the same racial or ethnic community into one particular area or location with segregated, and often substandard education, health and social services, blaming it on a series of spontaneous accidents driving prejudice and personal choices.

As a Roma woman from a small Hungarian town, Szekszárd, I always knew I was privileged that my parents could provide me with proper education and aspirations for a good life. However, when I was fired from a workplace at the age of 21, precisely because of my Roma origin, I made a lifelong commitment to challenge and stand up against racism. At the age of 30, I was appointed as UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, and a few years later, I became member and rapporteur of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).

I have always been deeply troubled by examining disaggregated poverty data (where these exist) and reports about political, social and economic exclusion by population groups and recognizing that it is systematically the minorities, Indigenous peoples, Afro-Descendants, schedules castes, and other racialized groups, and especially the women from these communities, who are at the bottom of these statistics, and for several decades, steadily so. UNDP’s own publication, “Global Multidimensional Poverty Index Report: Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste and gender”, highlights many such trends. It shows for example that in seven out of eleven Latin American countries examined, Indigenous groups were the poorest and that five out of six multidimensionally poor people in India live in households whose head is from a Scheduled Tribe, a Scheduled Caste or Other Backward Class.

In the development framework, Sustainable Development Goal 10.3 commits to ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome, including by eliminating discriminatory laws, policies and practices and promoting appropriate legislation, policies and action in this regard. However, when populations are being purposefully pushed further and further behind, it becomes increasingly challenging to live up to our promise to leave no one behind. Racism hampers progress in every domain in which we operate, from conflict prevention to peacebuilding, from displacement to access to justice, from deforestation to health, from gender equality to governance. In my capacity as Special Rapporteur, I prepared a report to the Human Rights Council, “Ensuring the inclusion of minority issues in post-2015 development agendas”, to demonstrate how persons belonging to minorities were marginalized. In this report, I analysed the situation of minorities in the context of the 11 areas of global consultations on people’s vision for the post-2015 development agenda. I provided recommendations on how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should be more inclusive. However, minorities were not even named and SDGs, targets and indicators remained “disturbingly silent about the eradication of systemic racism and racial and ethnic discrimination which constitute global barriers to human development and the fulfilment of human rights throughout the lifespan”.