Publication: Ethnic Monitoring and Data Protection. The European Context
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Subject: Publication: Ethnic Monitoring and Data Protection. The European Context
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Publication: Ethnic Monitoring and Data Protection. The European
Context
CPS Books. Central European University Press - INDOK. 2001.
Ethnic Monitoring and Data Protection. The European Context
Edited by Andrea Krizsan
An increasing concern felt about the absence of ethnic statistics
concerning Roma and other minorities in most spheres of public life
led to the idea of this research project. Convinced that the
collection of such data would effectively help anti-discrimination
litigation, in early 2000 INDOK, the Hungarian Human Rights
Information and Documentation Center together with experts from the
European Roma Rights Center the Constitutional and Legal Policy
Institute and the Central European University launched the research
project. The findings of this project served as the basis of this
volume.
The volume contains studies on relevant practices utilized by two
international bodies: the Council of Europe and the United Nations
Commission for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
The second section of the volume consists of country reports on
related practices in the following European countries: Bulgaria, the
Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Latvia, Romania and
Spain. The concluding comparative study points out some common
characteristics and major differences in the law and practice of the
examined European countries and formulates some recommendations
regarding the issue discussed in the country reports.
This volume is a strong and well founded statement about the
compatibility of the collection of ethnic data for purposes of
minority protection on the one hand, and the principles of data
protection and informational self-determination on the other.
Contents
PREFACE by Dimitrina Petrova
EDITORIAL by Andrea Krizsan and Ivan Szekely
CONTRIBUTORS
I. INTRODUCTION
James Goldston:
Race and Ethnic Data: A Missing Resource in the Fight Against
Discrimination
II. THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION
a. Isil Cachet:
The Issue of Ethnic Data Collection from the Perspective of Some
Council of Europe Activities
b. Michael Banton:
Ethnic Monitoring in International Law: the Work of CERD
III. PRACTICE IN COUNTRIES OF EUROPE
a. Krassimir Kanev - Alexander Kashumov: The Case of Bulgaria
b. Barbara Bukovska (Kvocekova): The Czech Case
c. Alexander Dix: The German Experience
d. Andrea Krizsdn: The Case of Hungary
e. Ina Zoon - Daniel Wagman: The Case of Spain
f. Boris Koltchanov: The Case of Latvia
g. Florin Moisa: Some Related Practices in Romania
h. Michael Banton: Ethnic Monitoring in Britain
IV. CONCLUSION
Ivan Szekely:
Counting or Numbering? Comparative Observations and Conclusions
Regarding the Availability of Race and Ethnic Data in some European
Countries
APPENDIX: THE QUESTIONNAIRE
Preface
Dimitrina Petrova
Human rights ought to be enforceable. If a right can't be defended in
court, then it is little more than rhetoric. With this simple
assumption in our heads, we crashed against the wall we later came to
describe as indirect discrimination. We were human rights defenders
working at the European Roma Rights Center, and the year was 1997.
>From the numerous cases of abuse of Roma rights, we could see clear
patterns emerging: Roma suspects were more likely to be held in
detention than non-Roma for the same offences; Roma were more likely
to have their complaints unanswered and more likely to be beaten at
the moment of arrest or in detention; Romani children were more likely
to be sent to sub-standard schools for the mentally disabled; Roma
residents were more likely to be victims of urban planning projects
that would result in their displacement. More likely: a mathematical
probability that reveals a discriminatory effect, whether intended or
not, if race-neutral factors fail to account for the disparity.
Of all rights abuses, discrimination is among the most difficult to
prove. But absent proof, the right to equality of treatment,
irrespective of race or ethnicity, can't be vindicated.
Anti-discrimination litigation - especially when challenging systemic
inequalities - needs statistics as evidence. Designing social
policies, too, is hazardous without more or less accurate quantitative
predictions. How can a budget aimed at compensating structural
disadvantages be developed if the num -her of persons in the
disadvantaged category is unknown? But finding reliable race- or
ethnic-coded data has been a frustrating experience. Answers, even by
experts, have bordered on statistical agnosticism.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Race Discrimination
and other international bodies have repeatedly urged governments to
provide in their reports demographic, economic, health, educational,
employment and other data broken down by ethnicity, but few
governments have been willing to do so in sufficient detail. Data
protection laws are often cited as the main obstacle to collecting
ethnic statistics, even though the ethnic statistics in question would
contain no information about any single individual.
When in Hungary data protection laws were enacted, the Roma leaders
celebrated a victory: from that moment on, the press would stop
circulating police statements about the proportion of Roma crime.
However, what was difficult to realize at that point, was that the
"struggle against discrimination," which they had chosen as the banner
of the movement, could from now on be confined to the realm of
political slogans, very much in the interest of any future
governmental demagogue.
This volume is floating in the turbulent space created by three focal
human rights issues: the right to access to information, the right to
privacy, and the right to equal treatment irrespective of race or
ethnicity. But the careful reader of the analyses offered here will
see that the tension between these rights is discursive: defense
strategies with a view to these different rights appear as conflicting
only at the level of political debate, which is of course historically
rooted. Racial profiling has served genocidal purposes. Ethnic
statistics has been, and- indeed-continues to be abused for
anti-minority purposes. But generalized data are impersonal, and there
are ways to ensure that abuse would not be tolerated; there are even
ways to store data so that it would rule out abuse. It is a matter of
laws and regulations of data collection, storage, and use. Absent the
political controversy, it is possible, and indeed necessary to defend
these rights simultaneously. While asserting our right to be free from
discrimination, we at the same time want to have our privacy rights
intact; to enjoy both, we need to exercise our right to obtain
information from public bodies. Moreover, our right to be free from
racial or ethnic discrimination should be interpreted to imply a right
to obtain statistical data broken down by ethnicity, if such data
would be critical evidence proving that we have been victims of
indirect discrimination.
This book touches upon the right to cultural and ethnic identity as a
matter of free choice. It relates thus to the paradox of disadvantaged
identity: to challenge anti-Romani prejudice and the reduction from a
universal human being to a particular human being, a "Roma," one first
has to say she is "Roma." To challenge this type of reduction from the
universal to the particular (which I think is the essence of phenomena
such as prejudice and discrimination), one has to assume and for some
time dwell in the reduced identity, in a somewhat self-defeating
manner. In order to attack a reality in which there are "Roma" opposed
to "non-Roma," one has to construct the dichotomy first. The claiming
of that identity excludes others and at least partially opposes them.
We then encounter a curious performative contradiction: those who want
to end the racist distinction first have to define and measure the
racial group, at the risk of essentialization.
It is perhaps the instinctive protest to this reduction that has made
many minority activists hostile to racial statistics. "It is not
important whether I am Roma, we are all citizens of the country," they
say. The second and more important reason for the suspicion to ethnic
data is the memory of the Holocaust and other historic forms of
persecution: people of Jewish and Romani ethnicity have been first
singled out and then destroyed. Understandably, hiding one's ethnicity
has become a tool of survival. This book is a modest contribution to
the realization that stating one's ethnicity and using racial or
ethnic statistics can be a tool of reaching genuine racial equality
and justice.
--
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