Debate: The Anti-racism protests following the death of George Floyd
Date: WEDNESDAY, 17 JUNE 2020
Speaker: Věra Jourová
Language: EN

The Commission condemns all instances of racist or xenophobic hatred and violence. But let me also be clear that we condemn violence in general, wherever it comes from, and that the police needs to do its demanding job but always within clear limits of the law. Racial or ethnic profiling and selective approaches should not be tolerated. And, by the way, our Fundamental Rights Agency already published, I think two years ago, very useful guidelines which would serve as a training for the police and for the armed forces to avoid this kind of treatment. Yes: black lives matter because all lives matter. Everyone, black, white or any other race or nationality, deserves the same chance to be able to participate and pursue happiness in our social environment. We all should be able to say to our children and grandchildren: ‘do not worry, nobody will kill you because of the colour of your skin’. But this debate is also about where we are in Europe with racism and xenophobia, and we have a lot of data, for instance, from the already mentioned Fundamental Rights Agency in its latest report which brings clear evidence that people with minority backgrounds continue to experience harassment, violence and ethnic and racial discrimination in different areas of life in the EU. Indeed, As Members said several times here, we have strong legislation but the legislation cannot do the whole job. We have legislation at the highest possible level, as President von der Leyen mentioned, the Charter of Fundamental Rights. We have 20 years since the adoption of the Racial Equality Directive and over 10 years after the adoption of the framework decision on racism and xenophobia. We have strong legislation and the situation is still worrying, remains worrying. We indeed need to promote and to get adopted the Equal Treatment Directive, which was mentioned here many times. It’s a shame, I would say, that this directive waits 12 years for adoption and I fully rely on my colleague, Helena Dalli, who was here a while ago, that she will be very determined to convince the Member States to take a unanimous decision, because this this directive requires unanimity. The legislation itself is so important, its implementation and proper enforcement, but we need much more, because what’s our problem? It’s deep-rooted prejudice and thinking grounded in stereotypes. We need awareness-raising, we need education, we need culture and we need equality bodies, which were strengthened by our legislation in the last mandate and which should do the good job. We need trust from the people belonging to minorities to report on the cases of harassment and violence against them. They do not trust, they do not report and next week we will also update our strategy on implementation of the Victims’ Rights Directive to encourage victims to report. But we should do much more not to have the victims. It’s late to respond only with criminal justice. We have problems in all the Member States. I would say this is a pan-European problem but with country-specific symptoms. We only have 15 Member States at this moment which have a strategy against racism. We have to talk seriously about that; it has to be changed. We also had to work much more with the digital world because we saw a lot of increase of hatred online. We have quite efficient instruments against hate speech and we have the platforms cooperating, but we need to do much more in this direction. This year, as you know, as per the work programme of the Commission, we want to uphold our European Charter of Fundamental Rights by adopting the strategy on charter implementation. We will also update the strategies on Roma inclusion and LGBTI equality later this year. And, if you noticed, also in the proposal for the EU New Generation budget, there is a very clear line that it must have social dimension and nobody should be lagging behind, and everybody should get the chance to avail themselves of EU funding. We will have the European Social Fund, which is also hopefully well equipped to help minorities. We cannot trivialise the matter. This is not about which political colours we are wearing, but about very basic human rights, the right to be treated equally, regardless of colour of skin, our religion or sexual orientation. We politicians should be put more under pressure. We politicians and opinion leaders who have the influence on what society thinks and how the people approach matters related to minorities, we have to refrain from spreading racially charged hatred for political gains and invest in long-term education and culture and do many more long-term measures. As Ursula von der Leyen said, I can also confirm I don’t have a clue how it feels to be black. I have never experienced any kind of discrimination. That’s why, whenever I go to the Member States and I speak, for instance, to young Roma people, I always ask those who managed to study at secondary school, who managed to study at university. My question is: ‘how did you manage that’, because I know that their starting line is so difficult, much more difficult than the starting line of my children or the children of many of us here.  And they always tell me there were three moments: ‘at some moment I realised I do not want to live the life of my parents. I want to do something more. I want to get out of the trap of, usually, poverty’, poverty was the problem. The second very important thing and condition: ‘I needed to find a helping hand’. Those who managed always found a helping hand. In their local community it was the mayor, it was the NGO, it was the teacher or director of the school. They could not manage without the help. So, zero tolerance for discrimination and zero tolerance for racism cannot be enough. We have to take proactive actions and support people to get out of trouble.