Publications

Weekly Mail n°308

16 March 2012

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  • Reminder: ENAR launches its 2010-2011 Shadow Report on racism in Europe

ENAR invites you to the launch event of ENAR’s 2010-2011 Shadow Report on racism in Europe on Thursday 22 March 2012, 10.30 – 13.00, in the European Parliament in Brussels, which will be hosted by the European Parliament’s Anti-racism and Diversity Intergroup. ENAR’s 2010-11 Shadow Report on racism in Europe is a unique mechanism to collect and present the views of civil society on the state of racism in EU member states and across Europe. It draws on national shadow reports produced by ENAR members across the EU member states and highlights many worrying trends and few improvements in the situation of racism in Europe. ENAR will also organise a press conference on the 21st of March at the Residence Palace in Brussels from 10 to 11 am. Read more

 
 

 

 

 
  • Caritas Europa’s point of view on the EU funding hearing which ENAR attended for migration, integration and asylum
Caritas Europa, together with ENAR, PICUM, CEPS, ECRI, took part in the European Parliament's Hearing on “EU Funding on Migration, Integration and Asylum - Testing the Added Value” on Wednesday 7 March. CARITAS, PICUM, ECRI concentrated the future funding, while ENAR and CEPS concentrated on the actual data. The Commission proposes a new financial framework for 2014 – 2020, where the current asylum and migration related funds will be merged. The main points Caritas Europa (CE) raised were: Merging the existing funds could be a good step, if it increases coherence between EU financial instruments and contributes to administrative simplification, CE is concerned with the proposed flexibility of EU funds, the Commission proposal refers to flexibility in relation to addressing the emergency response mechanism and to cater for adapting to political priorities, CE questioned how the needs and “political priorities” will be identified and decided and proposed a consultation with NGOs and local and regional authorities during the negotiations process. Read more
 
 
 
  • European Anti Poverty Network campaigns to support 20% European Social Fund allocation for social inclusion

Following its response to the Commission’s legislative package for Cohesion Policy, EAPN calls on all Member States to support the Commission’s proposal of a 20% ring-fenced allocation of the European Social Fund (ESF) for social inclusion and the fight against poverty. The call was made in a letter to all Directors General of Cohesion Policy in the Member States, in advance of their meeting on the 13-14 March. The ESF’s potential for contributing to the EU poverty-reduction target is currently under threat, as some Member States are expressing reservations with regard to the introduction of the proposed 20% ring-fencing for social inclusion. “Prime Ministers cannot agree a target to reduce poverty on one hand and then deny the financial means to make progress towards reaching that target” said Ludo Horemans, President of EAPN. Read more

 


 
Christians far outnumber Muslims as migrants around the world, including in the European Union where debates about immigration usually focus on new Muslim arrivals, according to a new study issued on Thursday. Of the world's 214 million people who have moved from their home country to live in another, about 106 million (49 percent) are Christians while around 60 million (27 percent) are Muslims, the study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said. Only 3.6 million Jews around the world have moved across international borders, the study said, but that is 25 percent of the world's Jewish population, by far the highest proportion on the move of any faith group."Many experts think that, on the whole, economic opportunities - better jobs and higher wages - have been the single biggest driver of international migration," it said."At the same time, religion remains a factor in some people's decisions to leave their countries of birth and their choices of where to go."The study defined migrants as people living in another country in 2010 for over a year, including estimates of illegal immigrants and long-term refugees including Palestinians and their descendants. Read more
 
 
 
  • Germany, Austria warn Greece to tighten border controls
Germany and Austria called on Greece on 8 March to tighten immigration controls, saying that other countries in the European Union may be forced to reinstate border checks if Athens did not act. EU countries have become increasingly critical of Greece's lax control of its border with Turkey, as the number of immigrants crossing it has risen due to political unrest in the Middle East. A group of seven EU ministers of justice and home affairs urged Greece to improve border controls using available EU funds."The question still remains what happens when a country is not capable of securing its borders, as we see in Greece," German Justice Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told journalists after a gathering of EU ministers."Is it possible to reinstate border controls?" he said. "I want to clarify that this is still part of our discussion." His remarks were echoed by Austrian home affairs minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner. "We need to put political pressure on Greece to implement their asylum authority as rapidly as possible. This border is as open as a barn door." Several EU governments have lobbied to make it easier to curb unrestricted travel in Europe and reinstate passport controls, abolished under the Schengen agreement. Read more
 
 
 
Just days after a hotel was firebombed in a suspected racist attack, experts and activists have warned of neo-Nazi groups turning to ‘terrorist’ campaigns as they become increasingly influenced by far-right movements in other countries. They say that extremist groups in countries such as Russia, Italy and Germany are providing Czech right-wing movements with operational, organisational and ideological inspiration and support for racial violence and ways of gaining public support. Gwendolyn Albert, a prominent anti-racism campaigner in the Czech Republic, said: "It is an established fact that the Czech and German ultra-right parties have entered into cooperation agreements. "The Czechs now seem to be following German tactics of having a relatively mainstream-looking, officially registered political party hold public rallies which those ideologically committed to racist violence then attend in hopes of actually carrying out that violence." Read more
 
 
 

  • Romanian senator hit with holocaust charges

Two Romanian civic rights groups on Wednesday 7 March petitioned for criminal charges against a prominent politician over his denial of the Jewish Holocaust in the country. Two non-governmental organizations - the Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism and Romani Criss - said they filed the charges against the Social Democratic senator Dan Sova after he said that Jews were not persecuted in Romania during World War II. Filed with the state prosecutor, the charges are the first against a politician for the denial of the Holocaust in Romania. The prosecutor is now to decide whether he will press the charges in court. In an interview with the TV station Money Channel on Monday, Sova also downplayed the magnitude of a massacre of Jews in Iasi in 1941 and denied that any Romanian took part in it. The country allied with Hitler's Germany during the conflict. Read more
 
 
 
A combative Nicolas Sarkozy during a TV show on the 6th of March said there are too many immigrants in France and tried to defend his leadership and economic policy."Our system of integration is working more and more badly, because we have too many foreigners on our territory and we can no longer manage to find them accommodation, a job, a school," he said. Himself the son of a Hungarian immigrant and a former minister of interior, Sarkozy has pursued hardline policing against irregular migrants, such as the 'voluntary' repatriations of thousands of Roma travellers to Romania and Bulgaria in 2010 or the push-backs of Tunisian migrants coming via Italy. He has been accused of adopting a more extreme right-wing discourse in a bid to woo voters from nationalist leader Marine Le Pen because he trailing in the polls behind the Socialist contender in the run up to April elections. Read more
 
 
 
 

  • Will emigration replace immigration as Europe’s populist flashpoint?
Ten years ago, European immigration policy was run almost exclusively by interior ministers – shy nocturnal creatures who viewed mobility as something deeply threatening. If immigrants weren’t bogus asylum-seekers, they were almost certainly welfare-shoppers or, at the very least, irregular. In the last few years, however, the EU’s economic, foreign and development ministries have encouraged their colleagues to think again: the immigrant masses may be huddled, it seems, but many of them are distinctly white-collared too. This realisation that the skilled and wealthy also migrate has allowed the EU to begin recalibrating its relations with third countries, particularly in eastern Europe – Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine – and now in North Africa too – Tunisia and Morocco. There’s been a similar change of thinking regarding the migration of European citizens within the EU. Mobility is thus becoming something of a bedrock for the EU’s relations with its citizens as well as with the world beyond. This is not to say that European citizens exactly welcome these immigrants (as Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent statements and a potential revision of free-movement laws prove), but after the drastic drop-off in immigration rates to many EU states in 2009 there is a slightly pathetic sense of relief that well-qualified people still want to come. There is, however, one small fly in the ointment: the well-qualified individuals who immigrate must also have emigrated from somewhere. This has political implications. Recent research draws attention to the phenomenon of ‘trapped populations’, a poor and immobile section of the global population abandoned to an uncertain future by their more mobile countrymen. Read more
 
 
 
 
  • Dole rights of migrants to Germany cut by regulation
Last year, an ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked – somewhat controversially – that a crisis-wracked Europe was once again speaking German. In Germany, however, the language of the crisis – increasingly audible on city streets – is Spanish, Italian and Greek. Faced with hopeless job prospects at home, young Spaniards and Greeks are heading to search for work in Europe’s largest economy, as it is largely insulated from the surrounding turbulence. While they hunt for a job, these young EU citizens once were entitled to basic German dole of €374 a month plus benefits. Mutual welfare entitlements have been part of the European landscape since the signing of the European Convention on Social and Medical Assistance in 1953. When it came into force a year later, all signatories, including Ireland, agreed to extend to citizens from other signatory countries the same welfare entitlements as their own citizens. Today, some 17 countries are signatories of the convention, including non-EU members such as Norway and Turkey. But the German labour ministry has now acted to block immediate welfare payments to arrivals from other members of the convention.“We will not help solve problems in Greece or Spain by attracting people to our welfare system,” said a labour ministry spokesman. Read more
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

The fight against anti-semitism has just got a whole lot more difficult. The Conservatives, Socialists and Liberals in the European Parliament have just decided to extend a massive subsidy to promote political anti-semitism. €289,266 of taxpayers' money will now be given to openly anti-Jewish parties like Hungary's Jobbik, whose MEPs tried to take their seats in Strasbourg wearing the uniform of the anti-Jewish Hungarian Guard. Krisztina Moravi headed the Jobbik list in the last European Parliament elections and declared she "would be glad if the so-called Hungarian Jews went back to playing with their tiny circumcised dicks instead of vilifying me." Predictably, le grandpère of anti-semitic parliamentary politics, Jean Marie Le Pen, who is still an MEP at the age of 83 after decades of anti-Jewish sneers, will also benefit from the handout. The European Parliament grant has been given to the European Alliance of National Movements, (EANM) a grouping of 13 far-right parties. Only three of them have MEPs - eight in total from Britain's BNP, France's Front National, and Hungary's Jobbik. Read more
 
 
 
 
 
  • Verhofstadt rides on Dutch PVV debate to attack Sarkozy
GuyVerhofstadt, leader of the liberalALDEgroup, said on 13 March that the recent verbal attacks by French President NicolasSarkozyon immigrants and theSchengenagreement were worse than the silence of the Dutch government over the discriminatorywebsiteof the Dutch Freedom party (PVV). Speaking in the European Parliament during a debate on thePVVwebsite,Verhofstadtcalled on all parties in the Dutch government to distance themselves from the site's content and to condemn the attempt to incite intolerance and hatred against fellow Europeans. Much of the debate focused on Dutch Prime Minister MarkRutte, who has so far refused to take a stand against thePVVwebsiteafter European Parliament President MartinSchulzasked him to do so during the 1-2 March EU summit. Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister, also took aim at the recent statements bySarkozy, who has turned to anti-immigration rhetoric in his electoral campaign against Socialist challengerFrançois Hollande. "To say that half of the immigrants should leave France, to attackhalalfood, and at the same time, attack his partners with regard toSchengen… This campaign, with a president using a similar language, this is something never seen before,"Verhofstadtsaid, drawing applause in Parliament. "Who is actually the candidate of the far right? Marine Le Pen or NicolasSarkozy." Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, is assured a place on the ballot on the 22 April first-round election in France. Le Pen announced she had collected the 500 signatures from elected officials required under the constitution to appear on the ballot. Read more
 
 
 
 

  • Refugee resettlement priorities for 2013
On 8 March 2012 the Justice and Home Affairs Council adopted a decision which introduces EU refugee resettlement priorities for 2013, as well as new rules on the financial support that the member states receive from EU funds to accommodate refugees from outside the EU in their territories (resettlement). Under the new decision, member states will be entitled to receive from the European Refugee Fund a fixed amount of: EUR 6000 per resettled refugee, if they are applying for such compensation for the first time; EUR 5000per refugee, if the state had already applied for such compensation once before; EUR 4000 for all other states. These new co-financing rules are an addition to the existing legal framework that regulates the European Refugee Fund (EUR 630million) over the period 2008-2013. The Fund was established to co-finance national efforts in receiving refugees and displaced persons and guaranteeing them access to consistent, fair and effective asylum procedures. Read more
 
 
 
 
  • Council of Europe Anti-Racism Commission to prepare report on Finland

A delegation of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) visited Finland from 27 February to 2 March 2012 as the first step in the preparation of a monitoring report. During its visit, ECRI’s delegation gathered information on the implementation of the recommendations it made to the authorities in its previous report of 2007 and discussed new issues that have emerged since. The delegation held meetings in Helsinki and Turku with representatives of all relevant ministries, other competent authorities, human rights NGOs and vulnerable groups. Following this visit, ECRI will adopt a report to be published early in 2013 in which it will make a new set of recommendations on measures to be taken by the authorities to address racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance in the country. Among these, three will be revisited two years after the publication of the report as part of an interim follow-up procedure. Read more

  
 
 
 
 

On the 10 March in Slovakia the opposition Social Democrats (Směr-SD) overwhelmingly defeated their political rivals in early parliamentary elections. With 44.41 % of the votes, the party has won a comfortable majority in the 150-member chamber. Romani candidate Peter Pollák has also made it into the National Council for the "Ordinary People and Independent Personalities" party (Obyčajní ľudia a nezávislé osobnosti - OLNO). The party took third place with 16 seats. "I believe it is good for Slovakia that someone will be in parliament who won't just talk about the Romani issue, but will start doing something too. I believe Slovakia needs a person in parliament who is thoroughly familiar with this issue and is informed enough to successfully address it," Pollák told Gipsy Television after learning of his victory. Read more
 
 
 
  • Note from Central Europe: Roma Economic Inclusion and the Road to Legitimacy
In early April 2011, the European Commission issued a [Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up to 2020]. The framework comes at a time when Europe’s Roma population has been increasingly targeted by authorities in certain European Union member states. Roma are four times more likely tolive below the poverty line than individuals from other ethnic backgrounds, amplifying the effects of displacement. Researchers have also looked at entrepreneurship among Roma populations as a potential means for creating greater economic inclusion. Many studies, including a 2006 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) study, have shown that due to both social characteristics and forced isolation, there is a strong desire for self-sustainability among Roma populations that in turn creates opportunities for entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, if poor Roma want to obtain capital they are currently forced to rely on informal moneylenders thus creating undocumented financial transactions. The UNDP study also demonstrated that Roma populations are frequent borrowers. Read more
 
 
 
  • Press Release by Romedia Foundation – Uprooted at Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival

The Romedia Foundation’s latest film Uprooted has been nominated for an award at the 8th Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival on April 19-22 in Doha, Qatar. From over a thousand entries, Uprooted was the only Hungarian film chosen among 46 films competing in the short film category. Going back and forth between Germany and Kosovo, Uprooted brings the voice of Romani youths into the debate on immigration in Europe. In October 2010, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have “utterly failed”. From the perspective of children like Anita, Sedat and Nasmija, born and raised in Germany by parents who had fled Kosovo in the 1990s, the statement makes no sense. For them, there is no question: they are German. Executive director of the Romedia Foundation, film director Katalin Bársony is the first Romani director to be nominated for an award at this festival. Read more

 
 
 
 
 

 

  • International UNITED Conference: "Where do We Stand? A Map for Human Rights"

Turkey is a country that comprehends a centuries-old mix of ethnicities, languages, cultures, religions and traditions. It is home not only to Turks, Kurds and Armenians, but also many other minorities. Nonetheless, Turkey has not yet adopted a general antidiscrimination legislation - including any against hate crimes - and discriminatory attitudes are deeply rooted in Turkish society. The legislation is currently being drafted with the contribution of NGOs as well. It is with this particular situation in mind that, for the first time, the international UNITED conference will be organised in Turkey. With a call for nomination, activists are urged from across Europe to come together to discuss strategies to tackle hate crime, Islamophobia, to protect refugee rights, and promote minority rights. The aim is to develop counter strategies and practical responses to situations of discrimination and intolerance, providing an exchange platform of knowledge and good practice to develop the working methods of local NGOs and promote human rights for all. 22-27 May 2012 in Istanbul. Deadline for applications: 28 March 2012. Read more
 
 
 
 
  • Conference: "From segregation to integration - the role of culture in Roma inclusion"
On 18 April, the Commission will organise a conference discussing the substantial role that arts and culture may play in Roma inclusion. In fact, they may act as a bridge between Roma and the majority society, challenging stereotypes and prejudice. As recognized by most of the recently adopted national strategies for Roma integration, arts and culture have a substantial role to play in Roma inclusion. Material deprivation is the most visible component of social exclusion, but actions in support of inclusion may risk not being successful if only material deprivation is dealt with. In fact, such initiatives may be jeopardised when the intended beneficiaries live a situation of exclusion from the majority society's culture - which may critically undermine the motivation to change; and when prejudice and stereotypes affect social and cultural identities and the desire to belong. The conference will discuss how artistic and cultural activities may facilitate intercultural dialogue by building a bridge between the Roma and majority society. It will explore how participatory projects focused on arts may give a sense of empowerment and of self confidence. At the same time, they may open a space of encounter and understanding between the minority and the majority population. 18 April 2012 in Brussels. Read more
 
 
 
 
  • Danish conference on "Equal Pay - How do we strengthen access to justice?"
The Danish Institute for Human Rights will organize a conference on "Equal Pay - How do we strengthen access to justice?" on Friday, 11 May 2012 at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. The conference is supported by the Danish EU Presidency and the Danish Ministry of Employment. The aim of the conference is to highlight a number of important aspects of the conditions and difficulties for enforcement of the equal pay principle in Europe. The conference will focus on how to promote a more effective access to justice. Registration to the event is possible until 20 April 2012. Read more
 
 
 
 
 
  • International training: Your Power, Our Power
The Your Power, Our Power training is an empowerment training for educators, trainers, students, and social activists who want to learn methods and approaches that empower disenfranchised and socially or economically disadvantaged people like migrants, refugees and unemployed and that leads to social action for a fair society without discrimination and inequality. This training will be organised in the framework of the EU Grundtvig program. The training is based on the training methods of the Powerschool, an empowerment training for young people developed by the Dutch organization RADAR and the training PHARE (Peace, Human rights and Anti-racism Education) developed by the South African organization Umtapo Centre. Training: 2-7 September 2012 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Application deadline: 6 April 2012. Read more
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  • Vacancy: No Recourse to Public Funds Network Accommodation Coordinator - PRAXIS

A challenging post for an experienced housing specialist to develop innovative, new accommodation resources for vulnerable migrants having no recourse to public funds. Working with partner organisations in the housing sector and among faith communities, the post holder will ensure compliance with all legal requirements and best practice to ensure the safety and well-being of some of the most vulnerable migrants. This is a permanent appointment with 35 hours per week. Closing date for applications: Wednesday 4th April 2012. Read more

 

 

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