Addressing the aggravated meeting points of race and religion.

There are parallel, unequal regimes for the elimination of racial discrimination and the elimination of religious intolerance in international human rights law. While the movement towards the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination within the United Nations has been clear-sighted and tenacious, the story of the drafting of the religious intolerance instruments is one of hypocrisy, procedural disagreements and false starts. This contradistinction renders it difficult to ascertain the legal basis for investigating ‘aggravated discrimination’, which describes the common ground between racial and religious discrimination. Yet in the twentieth century alone, by some estimates, as many as 170 million human beings were the innocent victims of ethnic cleansing. The majority of these episodes of annihilation were religiously motivated. The paper traces the birth of the Race Convention; the death of the Religion Convention; and the growing common ground between race and religion. In the light of incidents such as the ‘Danish cartoons’, it is argued that it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the two concepts.