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Report: EU Insufficiently Deferential to Muslim Colonists
Most European Union nations are doing little to report incidents of racism or discrimination, the EU's racism monitoring agency said Tuesday.[Link to official report] The agency gave EU governments poor marks in its report for 2005 on the state of racism and xenophobia in the 25-nation bloc, concluding that the EU as a whole must increase efforts to combat discrimination. Beate Winkler, director of the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia, said most member states "still lack the necessary data to monitor how social and economic policies affect their ethnic communities." European governments must adopt a law setting out a standard definition of racism, said Anastasia Crickley, who chairs the monitoring agency's management board. Once all member states can use a single definition, they will be able to collect information on racist attacks. "Unfortunately we cannot sit here ... and say that the situation has improved," she said. According to the report, only Britain and Finland had "comprehensive" systems in place to report on racist violence, collecting details about victims and the locations of incidents. It said no official data was available at all on racist violence and crime from Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus and Malta. "As a result, some ethnic minority groups may experience discrimination without adequate response from the state," Winkler said. The agency holds that statistics are essential in fighting the root causes of racism and xenophobia. Britain topped the list with nearly 60,000 racist incidents reported between April 2004 and March 2005. German authorities recorded 15,914 crimes by right-wing or extremists last year, while France reported 974 racially motivated incidents. The agency said Denmark recorded the highest rise in recorded racist violence and crime, going from 36 in 2004 to 81 in 2005, a 69 percent increase. [snip] Reports from Belgium showed landlords sometimes refused to rent apartments to people with foreign names. Similar refusals were also documented in Denmark, France, Italy and Finland. The report pointed to two key incidents last year that highlighted exclusion and discrimination in Europe. It said violent riots in the suburbs of Paris and elsewhere in France in October and November 2005, largely by Muslim youths of Arab and African decent, was due to decades of discrimination in jobs and housing and overall alienation from mainstream society. The EU agency said such violence showed there was an urgent need to tackle discrimination. Posted by: exJAG 2006-11-29 |
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