GENEVA — The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has released a sobering assessment of the global state of minority rights, warning that national, ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities remain disproportionately excluded, targeted by hate speech, and at heightened risk of being left behind — despite six decades of international commitments. The report, submitted to the Human Rights Council’s 61st Session under document reference A/HRC/61/33, covers developments across 2025 and calls on states to take urgent and concrete action before a generation of hard-won progress is undone.

The report arrives at a critical moment. In 2025, the world marked the 60th anniversary of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination — the first core international human rights treaty ever adopted. But rather than celebrating progress, UN experts warned that this milestone was overshadowed by the increasing instrumentalization of racism and xenophobia in political discourse, with racial discrimination still deeply entrenched and disproportionately affecting minorities, Indigenous Peoples, and migrants.

At the eighteenth session of the Forum on Minority Issues, the High Commissioner drew attention to a deeply troubling pattern: minorities worldwide remain disproportionately affected by poverty, unemployment, and homelessness. Police violence against minorities has become, in the High Commissioner’s words, “distressingly common.” The report calls on states to adopt comprehensive anti-discrimination laws, ensure meaningful inclusion, integrate human rights education at all curriculum levels, and develop disaggregated data systems to strengthen accountability.

As of 2025, fewer than one quarter of the world’s countries had enacted anti-discrimination laws that met the minimum standards required under international law. More than 20 countries are actively engaged in reform efforts — a sign of progress, but one that also underlines the scale of the gap that remains.

The report devotes substantial attention to the situation of religious and belief minorities around the world, documenting a global pattern of persecution, discrimination, and violence — with antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Christian hatred all explicitly flagged as rising threats.

In a video message on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the High Commissioner stated that antisemitism was “rampant”, with Jewish people facing increased intimidation, threats, and physical violence across the globe. He warned of the particular dangers posed by the manipulation of language, disinformation, incitement to hatred, and identity politics. The same month, he addressed the European Parliament, calling for upgraded efforts to combat antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred, and other forms of hate speech as essential steps toward building inclusive societies.

On the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, the High Commissioner warned that Muslims continued to face prejudice, socioeconomic exclusion, religious profiling, unwarranted surveillance, and arbitrary detention. He expressed alarm at how religious differences had been “weaponized and manipulated for political gain,” calling on states to develop comprehensive anti-discrimination laws and to prosecute incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence.

The Tirana Framework for Confronting Intolerance — adopted at a conference jointly hosted by Albania and the University of Essex — called upon governments, the private sector, and civil society to address hate speech online and offline, including by building multi-sector alliances to collaboratively combat antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Muslim hate, and prejudice against Christian minorities and other religious or belief minorities.

One of the most striking sections of the 2025 report is its treatment of data-driven technologies and artificial intelligence as emerging threats to minority rights. The High Commissioner warned that predictive policing tools used to flag future crimes and likely suspects were reproducing historical bias against racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. He urged states to implement robust legal frameworks to ensure that AI systems are safe, transparent, and accountable — and to take specific action on equality and non-discrimination, data protection, and access to information.