European Diary:A week after a racist mob beat up eight Indians in a German town while chanting "foreigners out", further evidence was presented yesterday in Brussels documenting a recent upsurge in racist violence in Europe. The first report published by the EU Agency For Fundamental Rights shows a "notable upward trend" in racist crime connected with an extreme right-wing motive recorded in Germany and France.
Between 2001 and 2006 there was an average increase in this type of crime of 23.1 per cent in France and 12.2 per cent in Germany. There was also an alarming increase in anti-Semitic crime in France, with the number of these incidents rising by an average of 62.4 per cent during the same period.
The official government statistics quoted by the agency are supported by separate analysis from victims' organisations in eastern parts of Germany, which report 819 right-wing attacks in 2006, up from 694 in 2005. Berlin schools also report an increase in attacks. In the school year 2005/2006 there were 80 reported incidents with an extremist background, compared to 62 in 2004/5, and 39 in the school year 2003/4, according to the report, Racism and Xenophobia in Member States of the EU 2007.
The attacks in the German town of Mügeln last week have understandably prompted a tough reaction from European politicians. In an interview with the tabloid Bild am Sonntag on Sunday, EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini named five EU states that he believes face major problems with right-wing extremism: France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Italy. He also floated the possibility of banning far-right political parties such as Germany's National Democratic Party, a nationalist anti-immigrant group associated with neo-Nazi groups.
Such a controversial decision would probably cause more problems than it would solve and, in any event, was rejected by Germany's constitutional court in 2003 when it was proposed by the previous German government. But as the EU agency highlights in its report, there are several concrete and relatively simple measures that member states could take that would help tackle racist violence.
"A key issue remains data availability. In some member states there is a complete absence of data collected relating to ethnic origin," the author of the agency's report told the European Parliament's civil liberties committee yesterday. "There are also huge variations in the way that states collect data, making comparisons difficult." The agency concludes that this creates a superficial and often incorrect picture of the situation in Europe regarding racism and discrimination.
For example it often unfairly paints those European member states that set up effective collection mechanisms to record racist incidents as the most racist countries in Europe in the eyes of the media. This means that the figures published in relation to racist crimes perpetrated in Germany and France by extremists must be interpreted with the knowledge that only four of the EU's 27 states collect this type of data (Austria and Sweden are the others). In other words, states such as Bulgaria, Spain or Ireland may have a bigger problem with right-wing extremist attacks than either France or Germany.
The report also notes that only 11 of the 27 EU states collect any data on racist violence and crime. The average number of racist attacks recorded between 2001 and 2006 rose in eight out of these 11 states.
But comparing the statistics between states that use different collection systems can also lead to anomalies. For example the report notes that in Ireland there were 94 racist attacks in 2005 compared to 84 in 2004, while in Britain there was a massive 57,902 attacks in 2005. Britain's larger population and much more sophisticated and comprehensive system for collecting ethnic data in police incidents is probably the most significant reason for the huge difference.
There are also huge differences in the sanctions applied for racial discrimination. For example, one case in Britain led to an award of €1.46 million to a victim, while there was not even a single report of a discrimination case being taken on the basis of race in Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Lithuania, Malta, Poland or Spain, says the report.
The agency's message is simple: even if official statistics do not highlight a problem with racism it doesn't mean that a problem does not exist. To get an accurate picture of the problem member states should develop proper mechanisms to record violence and discrimination against minorities.