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
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!
__._,_.___
Posted by: "Roma Virtual Network"
<romale0804@yahoo.com>
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