The inauguration of the activities of the Working Group to Prepare a Draft Inter-American Convention against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance is a special moment for the Organization of American States. Almost 60 years after this Organization was founded, its member states were finally able to agree on the need to forge a solid and progressive instrument to strengthen the legal framework for protecting the human rights of millions of people who endure daily acts of racism, discrimination, and intolerance in our Hemisphere.

The challenge facing each of the delegates of the states represented here is to construct a draft convention that reflects common values, standards, and rules governing the actions of states to foster the freedoms of both their own citizens and noncitizens. To paraphrase the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, our task is to draft a text that represents “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations” of the Americas.

It is important for us to bear in mind that human rights treaties contain minimal parameters of protection aimed at establishing an “irreducible ethical minimum” for the defense of human dignity. Thus, the international rights addressed in human rights treaties might perhaps refine or strengthen, but never restrict or water down, the degree of protection of rights built into domestic constitutional provisions.

As regards specific instruments for protecting human rights, such as the one that will emerge from this Working Group’s negotiations, their principal purpose is to allow a specific and differentiated response to particular violations of rights to the detriment of certain groups of individuals. Accordingly, persons of African descent, indigenous peoples, migrants, Jews, Muslims, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, and homosexuals, as well as other groups of people, should be addressed according to the specific nature and special characteristics of their social condition. Thus, alongside the right to equality, we must also necessarily regard the right to be different as a fundamental right.

With these remarks of mine, in my capacity as Chair of the Working Group, I should like to express my confidence in the ability of our states to comply with the mandate contained in the first operative paragraph of resolution AG/RES. 2126 (XXXV-O/05), adopted at the OAS General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale. I trust that, in so doing, we will not lose sight of the importance of ensuring that the text of the future Convention reflects the legitimate concerns and claims of those who are the only raison d’être of this Organization: human beings.