A/HRC/41/47 II. Conceptual framework: intersecting stereotypes and human rights standards A. Dehumanization 5. Harmful stereotypes not only contribute to generating stigmatized categories and identities, but are also drivers for the dehumanization of groups of people. The process through which a group of people comes to be regarded as less human than others has stereotyping at its core. Furthermore, dehumanization and the exercise of abuse and violence are inextricably linked, since they are mutually reinforcing. That is why stereotyping is a paramount mechanism to be addressed in the prevention of violations and the promotion of human rights. 6. Stereotypes are produced through fixity and repetition. Stereotypes fix socially and historically produced patterns of representation on a particular group of people. The repetition of such fixed patterns in different situations allows for its universalization as “natural” truths. Stereotypes also work by excess and default. Labels that deprive people of their identify and of their right to a dignified life are awarded excessive visibility (by social representations from different sources), while insufficient visibility is accorded to the commonalities between the affected individuals and the rest of society. This deprives those individuals of the opportunity to participate in the larger community, and is a violation of their rights. 7. Extreme dehumanization becomes possible when the target group can readily be identified as a separate category of persons who are stereotyped and stigmatized as inferior, dangerous or uncivilized. 5 Through dehumanization, moral restraints that prevent the exercise of abuse and violence upon certain groups of people lose strength. Dehumanized groups are regarded as disposable and their annihilation (civil or material) is morally established as acceptable.6 8. Persons affected by leprosy were historically dehumanized under the harmful stereotype of the leper. Such stigmatizing sign (and its different cultural versions) has been employed throughout history as a label that subsumes a group of individuals under the negative attribute of a disease socially perceived as undesirable, pollutant and dangerous. 9. Protest against the widespread use of the stigmatizing sign of the “leper” arose in the mid-twentieth century, when persons who were forcibly segregated by State policies claimed that as long as stigmatizing language was in use, discrimination would persist. 7 However, the outcome of this struggle was still largely in the control of the medical community, who decided in favour of the expression “persons with leprosy” to replace the ostracizing sign of the “leper”, using it interchangeably with the noun “patient” and conferring, as such, equal meanings to both terms. 10. It was only in the late twentieth century that representatives of already established organizations of persons affected by leprosy moved against the hegemony of biomedicine in classifying groups of persons by diseases and rejected the expression “persons with leprosy”. In their view, the expression continued to put leprosy at the forefront of their identities and concealed the fact that many persons had already been cured of the infection caused by Mycobacterium leprae, even though they continued to live with physical impairments, discrimination and disability. 11. The currently used expression “persons affected by leprosy” was adopted as the first step towards self-identification to simultaneously refer to individuals currently under 5 6 7 Extreme examples of dehumanization are described in article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Herbert C. Kelman, “Violence without moral restraint: reflection on the dehumanization of victims and victimizers”, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 29, No. 4 (1973), pp. 25–61. Perry Burgess, “Shall we change the names leper and leprosy? Eradication of leprosy”, in Memoria del V Congreso Internacional de la Lepra (Havana, Cenit, 1949), pp. 818–819. 3