The Starting Point is a proposal for amending the European Community Treaty in 1996, so as to remedy an obvious defect in the original Treaty of Rome, which says nothing about racism or xenophobia. It is perhaps not surprising that, little more than a decade after the second world war, the drafters of the Rome Treaty should have thought it unnecessary to include any requirement not to discriminate on grounds of race, ethnicity or religion. The memory of the evils which racial and religious hatred can inflict was too recent. Unhappily, in recent years, racism and xenophobia have reappeared in ways which would have been unthinkable in 1957.
Racial violence is commonly in the news.
Certain individuals and organisations incite hatred of Jews, Muslims, black people, foreigners, asylum-seekers, Roma and Sinti and particular ethnic groups. These manifestations of hatred have been widely publicised, but there is an equally important problem to be resolved, namely, the everyday unjust discrimination which large numbers of people living in Europe suffer when they are denied access to employment, decent housing and other social goods and needs because of their race, colour, religion, or national, social or ethnic origin. They have also ratified the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, in which Article 14 guarantees the enjoyment of all the other rights in that Convention without discrimination on grounds of sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status, while Article 9 states the rights to practise a religion. All the member states include in their laws or constitutions some form of condemnation of racism. In principle, there appears to be no obstacle to amending the Treaty in the way suggested.