A/HRC/27/58 Year for Sport and Physical Education, to strengthen sport as a means to promote education, health, development and peace, and its resolutions 60/1 of 16 September 2005, 60/9 of 3 November 2005, 61/10 of 3 November 2006, 62/271 of 23 July 2008, 63/135 of 11 December 2008 and 65/4 of 18 October 2010. 16. The report of the Secretary-General entitled “Sport for development and peace: mainstreaming a versatile instrument” reviews the programmes and initiatives implemented by UN Members States , UN funds and programmes, specialized agencies and other partners, using sport as a tool for development and peace. The UN General Assembly recognized the potential of sport to contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), noting that sport has the potential, as declared in the 2005 World Summit Outcome, to foster peace and development and to contribute to an atmosphere of tolerance and understanding, and reaffirming that sport is a tool for education that can promote cooperation, solidarity, social inclusion and health at the local, national and international levels, as declared in the outcome document of the high-level plenary meeting of the GA on the MDGs. Moreover, numerous UN resolutions and reports appeal to advance peace, development, diversity, tolerance, fairness, mutual respect, human understanding, dialogue, reconciliation, competition spirit, gender equality, combating discrimination, racism, social exclusion and marginalization. Member States are for instance requested to create more opportunities for persons with disabilities, to contribute to expansion of mass sport activities, to support high performance in sporting events, to engage more children and young persons, women and girls and older persons in sport and to provide access facilitation and barriers-free environment. 17. It is worth outlining the regional scope of developing legal grounds for promoting human rights through sport and the Olympic ideal. A good example is the March 2013 Commonwealth Charter, which outlines the Commonwealth’s core values and aspirations. Building on previous communiqués and declarations (such as the Harare Declaration in 1991), the Charter demonstrates the commitment of Commonwealth countries to a defined set of shared beliefs.13 18. Observations of States and independent experts underpinned the work on this study to a major extent. It is furthermore essential to stress the tremendous contribution, including in terms of awareness raising, of scientific community that continues to provide vibrant critical evaluations, sometimes controversial and disputable, on all features of sport’s proliferation in society, to identify advantages and shortcomings of sporting management, to suggest ways and means of improvement in the interest of promoting human rights and, at the end, wellbeing of all. For many years governments have kept academics at arm’s length, academic knowledge was geared mostly to the sport community, the identification of talent and the production of medals-industrial complex.14 It appears that the increasing number of impressive academic multidisciplinary sport research leads to changing this situation, which deserves special attention, but is beyond the scope of this study. C. Role of different types of sporting events 19. Sporting events can help promote awareness and understanding of human rights principles through interaction between different people and cultures. It is important to identify synergies and complementarities between sport and human rights that would pinpoint the relations between them, so as to promote the values of diversity, tolerance and 13 14 6 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-commonwealth-charter. J. Maguire. Reflections on Process Sociology and Sport. “Walking the Line”. Series Sport in the global society–Contemporary perspectives. Oxon. 2013. p. 2.