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Ilke Adam is professor of political science at the Brussels School of Governance at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and co-director of BIRMM (Brussels Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Migration and Minorities).
When the European Union adopted its first anti-racism legislation in 2000, activists in Europe cheered it as a major step forward.
Two decades later, disillusion reigns.
The Race Equality Directive, which obliged states to adopt legislation forbidding racial discrimination and create equality bodies to support victims of discrimination, is poorly enforced. Racial discrimination cases are rare and equality bodies, where they exist, have no teeth.
The problem, meanwhile, has far from disappeared.
On the contrary, the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency and the Council of Europe warn of rising racial discrimination and violence. The outpouring of frustration at this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests was a clear sign that Europe’s job is far from done, and that current EU anti-discrimination policies are in urgent need of a makeover.
At its first-ever anti-racism summit on Friday, the EU has a chance to show that it is committed to living up to its fundamental values of equality and non-discrimination.
Some are likely to argue that the EU should simply address ongoing inequality by better implementing its existing Race Equality Directive. They’ll say we should focus on enforcing the law, supporting equality bodies in their work with victims, fostering strategic litigation and starting infringement procedures against member countries that fail to implement the measures.
But doing more of the same — just a bit better — won’t do much good. We need to completely rethink how we tackle the issue.
We need to listen to the demands of anti-racism activists and more fully take into account how racism works in Europe — namely, how our institutions discriminate.
The EU’s Race Equality Directive is based on an individual-rights model of enforcement, in which victims of discrimination need to file a complaint that can be brought to court.
Researchers and activists have long warned that such individualist approaches to racism and discrimination are mere band-aids. The systemic segregation of Roma children in schools or the demonstrated structural discrimination that translates into ethnic and racial inequalities in education, employment, health and housing cannot be addressed by this method.
EU legislation reflects a common misunderstanding of racism and discrimination as something bad that is done by individuals and should be punished at that level — rather than a system that stems from our history of slavery and colonial imperialism, whose legacies still create inequalities today.
Until the publication of the proposed EU’s Anti-Racism Action Plan in September, all European policy documents referred to Nazism as the ultimate expression of racism. There was no reference at all to Europe’s past of slavery and colonization.
Though it is still in early stage, the new action plan provides some hope to anti-racist equality activists. Finally, European leaders are acknowledging the existence of institutional and structural racism and expressing a sense of commitment to addressing it.
The plan lays out proactive policies to address structural racism and financially support national positive-action policies. It calls for the collection of sound data on race and ethnicity to better tackle discrimination. Crucially, it also includes pledges to finally address the whiteness of EU institutions.
As argued by ENAR, Equinox and more than 80 other civil society organizations, the success of this action plan’s implementation will depend on the “sustained and meaningful participation” of those directly affected by racism. Granting them a seat at the table is crucial to getting our policies right.
The action plan — still only a set of proposals made by the European Commission — will also need the buy-in of the European Council, the EU presidency and national governments. And that’s where the risk is.
Most can talk the talk when pressed — as they were in the aftermath of the global Black Lives Matter protests last summer — but to walk the walk, they need to make a concerted effort to better understand the root causes of racism in Europe.
The EU is already decades behind in its equality legislation. It’s time to catch up.
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