The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

Abstract

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) was established in the framework of the international Convention of the same name, which was adopted in 1965 and has since been ratified by 182 states. Its working methods have evolved over the course of its fifty years of existence. Its ambition to document de facto rather than solely de jure discrimination led the Committee to request that states equip themselves with statistical and categorization systems allowing for the inequalities between the various population groups – including ethnic and racial groups – to be measured. Our analysis of CERD’s archives from 1970 to 2018 and interviews conducted with several of their present-day experts show how the request for demographic data revealing, among other things, ethnic and racial origins became established despite internal debates among experts and widespread reluctance on the part of states. Underscoring this approach, that we called a pragmatic turn in the fight against discrimination, contributes to the literature on the role played by statistics in global governance as well as that on the way international organizations deal with racial issues.