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Equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin
September 27, 2007 12:00 AM
By Sarah Ludford in European Parliament
By Sarah Ludford in European Parliament
Sarah Ludford (ALDE ). - Mr President, I welcome very much the Commission taking infringement proceedings against 14 Member States for failure to properly implement the Directive.
I am chastened to see that my own state, the UK, is on the list. One of the issues in the case of my country is that the definition of indirect discrimination does not comply. Clearly there is no room for complacency, even in a country that has had legislation against race discrimination for over 40 years.
Strong political will is needed on this subject, which makes it all the more disappointing that the Council did not think this debate important enough for it to be represented.
I was very interested to hear the statistic quoted by Commissioner Michel that three out of four Europeans are willing for data on ethnic origin to be collected on an anonymous basis, and I welcome the fact that the Commission has done a lot of work in this area in recent years and produced a guide for best practice. We have come a very long way since 1999, when I dared put the words 'ethnic monitoring' in my draft report on the European Year against Racism and got whole bucketloads of objections.
I obviously agree with Mr Gaubert that we have to watch carefully that ethnic and racial data collected for purposes of highlighting and fighting discrimination does not itself become a tool of discrimination through racial or ethnic profiling.
I should like to ask the Commissioner to what extent, besides data protection safeguards, the police in their operations - which are, of course, a supply of services - fall within the scope of the discrimination ban, such as in their conduct of stop-and-search operations. The police as employers clearly fall within that scope, but I have never been entirely clear to what extent the Directive applies to police operations.
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