Special Rapporteur is a title given to individuals working on behalf of the United Nations within the scope of "Special Procedures" mechanisms who bear a specific mandate from the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The mandate by the United Nations has been to "examine, monitor, advise and publicly report" on human rights problems through "activities undertaken by special procedures, including responding to individual complaints, conducting studies, providing advice on technical cooperation at the country level, and engaging in general promotional activities." However, the Coordination Committee of Special Procedures Internal Advisory Procedure to Review Practices and Working Methods (25 June 2008) manual simply calls these individuals mandate-holders. Other applications of the role include "Special Representative of the Secretary-General" or "Independent Expert", or a working group usually composed of five members, one from each region of the planet.

Appointed by the UN Secretary General, these mandate-holders act independently of governments. The earliest such appointment was the 1980 Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances responding to Commission on Human Rights resolution 20 (XXXVI). The first Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions reporting to Commission on Human Rights resolution 1982/35 begun work in 1982.

Haja Zainab Hawa Bangura (born December 18, 1959 in Yonibana, Tonkolili District) is a Sierra Leonean politician and social activist. She is currently Sierra Leone minister of Health and sanitation. In 2007 Bangura became Sierra Leone's foreign minister in the government of President Ernest Bai Koroma of the All People's Congress (APC) Party. She is the second woman to serve as Sierra Leone's foreign minister, following Shirley Gbujama who held that position from 1996 to 1997. Bangura has been tiped by many political insiders to be Sierra Leone's first female president. As a devoted muslim, Zainab Hawa Bangura took time off politics in 2009 and headed to the Holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia and participated in the 2009 Hajj pilgrimage ceremony. [1]

Mrs. Bangura was born Zainab Hawa Sesay in the small rural town of Yonibana, Tonkolili District in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone. She hails from the Temne ethnic group. She was born into a rural Temne family of limited means. She obtained a scholarship to study at Mathora Girls Secondary School in the town of Mathora, Tonkolili District and later at the Annie Walsh Girls Secondary School in the capital city of Freetown. After graduating from Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College, she studied in the United Kingdom for advanced diplomas in insurance. While in her early 30s, she became vice-president of one of her country's largest insurance companies. She speaks three languages: Temne, Krio, and English.

Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as "indigenous" according to one of the various definitions of the term, though there is no universally accepted definition.

In the late twentieth century, the term began to be used primarily to refer to ethnic groups that have historical ties to groups that existed in a territory prior to colonization or formation of a nation state, and which normally preserve a degree of cultural and political separation from the mainstream culture and political system of the nation state within the border of which the indigenous group is located. The political sense of the term defines these groups as particularly vulnerable to exploitation and oppression by nation states. As a result, a special set of political rights in accordance with international law have been set forth by international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank. The United Nations have issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to protect the collective rights of indigenous peoples to their culture, identity, language, employment, health, education and natural resources. Depending on which precise definition of "indigenous people" used, and on the census, estimates of a world total population of Indigenous people range from 220 million Indigenous peoples in 1997 to 350 million in 2004.