This story was reported by the Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS).

GENEVA – Non-governmental organizations representing African descendants are demanding that United Nations documents referring to discrimination make explicit reference to anti-Black racism.

The refusal of states and institutions to specifically name anti-Black racism serves to perpetuate the exclusion, marginalization and oppression of people of African descent, according to the five groups and coalitions that signed a petition calling for this recognition.

The signatories are the African Canadian Legal Clinic, the Strategic Alliance of African Descendants of Latin America and the Caribbean, the December 12 Movement, the Process of Black Communities of Colombia and the University of Dayton in the United States.

The NGOs presented their petition to the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which concluded its fourth session Friday with the adoption of a text with recommendations on health care, employment and housing.

The working group, which was established by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, is made up of rapporteur-chairman Peter Lesa Kasanda of Zambia, Joe Frans of Sweden, George Nicolas Jabbour of Syria, Roberto Borges Martins of Brazil and Irina Zlatescu of Romania.

Martins, the Brazilian expert, was absent during the group's first session in November 2002 and did not attend this most recent session either. Frans, from Sweden, did not join in until the third session, in October 2003, because the bloc of western European nations that he represents intentionally delayed his designation.

The fact that none of the major Western countries attended this year's session highlighted their lack of support for the working group.

The five NGOS called on the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour and the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to work on increasing the participation of these countries in the group's sessions.

Vernellia Randall, a professor at the University of Dayton Law School, said that one of the most disappointing parts of the working group was ”the absence of the major Western states that had been involved in the transatlantic slave trade and have a high number of African descendants in their countries that have been impacted historically.”

The United States, where roughly 13 percent of the population is black, was not represented at the working group session. ”Canada is not here, Britain is not here. France is here today but it wasn't here during the last two weeks,” noted Randall, who also commented on the absence of Germany, Spain and Portugal.

The NGOs urged that the experts participating in future sessions of the working group have specific experience with the issues affecting African descendants in their areas of specialization.

They have also called on the group to make visits to different countries in order to learn more about the realities facing black communities there. The representative of the Process of Black Communities in Colombia, Alfonso Cassiani Herrera, said that at the session which ended Friday, the experts were asked to visit Colombia, Canada and the United States.

Descendants of African slaves, in addition to economic and political refugees and other immigrants of African descent throughout the world, including the Americas, Europe, Oceania and Asia, number close to 300 million people.

When combined with the population of Africa, they make up more than one-sixth of the world's inhabitants, according to Chris Alando of World Vision, an international relief and development organization.

Alando addressed the issue of employment as it affects African descendants, and one of the solutions he recommended for confronting discrimination against blacks in this area was foreign debt relief for the poor developing countries, as well as the nations of sub-Saharan Africa.

He also called for an end to the pressures on African countries to open their markets and privatise their public enterprises.

During the discussion on the recommendations to be adopted by the working group, some delegations, like those from Brazil, Chile and France, proposed that the text of the document should respect the language of the declaration and program of action adopted at the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in 2001.

They objected, for example, to the use of terms like ”institutional racism” and the concept of ”racial equality,” since they do not appear in the Durban documents.

However, other countries, like Mexico, Uruguay and all of the participating African nations, insisted that the working group was not compelled to restrict itself to the terminology used in Durban, and this was the position that finally won out.

Randall found it ”disturbing” that some of the states wanted to limit the language in the group's recommendations to what was used in the documents adopted at the world conference.

”Durban is a starting point, not a Bible or a constitution,” she said. ”It's a starting point for the discussion, and we should be able to break outside of this language to incorporate whatever new language we need. So, I'm happy that we are doing that.”

All in all, Randall was pleased with the working group, and said that the very fact that it existed marked significant progress.  ”I'm almost 60 years old, and in my lifetime this is the first major working group that is looking at the status of people of African descent in the world,” she said.

”There is a lot of work that needs to be done with people and in the world, but it's a great first step,” she concluded.

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