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18. 05. 2015.

[Roma_Francais] Petition: Revise the implementation of the Racial Equality Directive and the work of the anti-discriminatory bodies across the EU


Petitioning Vĕra Jourová » European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality and 2 others

Revise the implementation of the Racial Equality Directive and the work of the anti-discriminatory bodies across the EU


By Atanas Stoyanov, Hungary

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Respected all, 
Nowadays, the 6 million estimated Roma people, citizens of EU, are still daily object of hatred and discriminatory speech, including speeches from the parliamentary tribunes of many countries, members of the European Union. The European Union, established on the values of respect for human dignity, liberty, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities, is witnessing Roma forced evictions, ghettoization, school segregation of Roma children and continuous anti-Gypsism speech from mass media.

The efforts of the European Union taken to better the situation of the Roma European citizens are laudable, but the adoption of strategic documents is not enough. The documents, which the EU has so far adopted with regard to Roma remain a soft law with desirable nature for the member-states. Moreover, the EU anti-discrimination directives (2000/43/EC, 2008/913/JHA, and 2000/78/EC) are systematically violated by the member states and the EU does not exercise the required monitoring to ensure the non-violation of its own legislation. In this respect, the EU institutions bear the main blame for the lack of effective implementation of its directives. There are required actions and mechanisms to ensure the compliance with European legislation. Unfortunately EU is failing in this endeavour.

According to Article 19 of the Council Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 November 2000 establishing a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation, and Article 17 of the Council Directive 2000/43/EC of 29 June 2000 implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin, the member-countries should report the implementation of these directives once in five years. This long period of reporting leaves European Commission away from what is happening in the Member States and makes the existence of these directives useless. Discrimination is a phenomenon that we, as European citizens and institutions, must fight every day and from which hundreds of thousands of EU citizens suffer on a daily basis. Reporting on the progress of Member States once every five years is an indicator of a weak political will to tackle this problem.

The Equal Treatment Authorities established in the EU countries and their national anti-discrimination legislation remain highly unsynchronized with the EU anti-discrimination directives and extremely neglected by national and European authorities. The appointment of members of these anti-discrimination bodies is highly politicized and lacks transparency.

The current letter is prompted particularly by the dissatisfaction related to the lack of effective anti-discrimination body and political negligence on non-discrimination in Bulgaria: an eloquent example of what happens with the European anti-discrimination legislation. Bulgaria is the country with the highest Roma ratio in Europe. In Bulgaria the Racial Equality Directive and all other anti-discrimination legislation is transposed through the Law on Protection against Discrimination (LPD), January 1, 2004. The discrepancies between the national and the European law are many:

·         There is no definition of national or ethnic minority in the national legislation of Bulgaria which makes useless any transposition of European and other international anti-discrimination law.

·         Paragraph 5, Article 40 of the LPD clearly states: “The Committee submits to the National Assembly each year to 31 March report on its activities, including information on the activities of each of its permanent specialized units”. There is evidence (please find attached in Bulgarian) that the annual reports of the Bulgarian Committee for Protection against Discrimination were not voted by the Bulgarian Parliament since 2009, or for six years,  in violation of the above mentioned article.

·         The appointment of the 9-member composition of the Committee is highly politicized: Committee-members are being appointed by the Parliament and the President, as only 4 of 9 must be legally qualified (LPD). This presupposes anti-discrimination body to be used as an instrument of political attacks and machinations, but not as an anti-discrimination body, including leading and independent politically persons and representatives of civil society organizations.

·         Although the reports for its activities are not being voted, the Committee is being granted with around 2 million Bulgarian Leva annually (data is in their website) having administration of less than 50 people. It is not clear to us, as European citizens, how these funds of European taxpayers are spent. This is a huge amount for such a small administration and the media has already reported cases of missing financial documents (2012).

·         The anti-Gypsism speech in Bulgaria is a daily phenomenon. In December 2014 for example became widely known the anti-Roma statements of the Bulgarian Healthcare Minister, Petar Moskov and the Member of the Parliament, Valeri Simeonov. Despite the broad international coverage reaction from the national government or from the EU institutions did not follow. The only international institution to react on time was the US Embassy in Sofia. The citizens of the EU need primarily a reaction from the EU, and not from the US. There is no information on how many times the Committee has sellf-initiated proceedings, although this right is provided by law.

Irregularities in the Bulgarian Commission for Protection against Discrimination as the national authority for the implementation of the Racial and Equality Directive are many. We are convinced that there are such irregularities in the non-discrimination bodies of many other Member States, and especially those with compact Roma population.

We urge you:

·    To create an emergency working group with the involvement of civil society organizations and specially Roma organizations, to ensure the independence, funding, transparency and the involvement of civil society in the anti-discriminations national bodies of the EU.

·         To require the reporting on the implementation of the Racial and Equality Directive to happen on annual basis with the shadow reporting from the side of the civil organizations.

·         To take the needed steps to ensure that national legislation does not prevent the full implementation of the Racial Equality Directive and other European anti-discrimination law, in violation of the Community standards.

·         To appoint a special working group to investigate the work of the Bulgarian authorities concerning the work of the Committee for Protection against Discrimination and any other similar body in EU.

We sincerely believe that with joint efforts Europe can combat discrimination!
  

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Posted by: "Roma Virtual Network" <romale0804@yahoo.com>

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