‘France must do more against systemic discrimination’
France’s human rights auditor said that authorities needed to take measures to halt racial discrimination that has become a “systemic element” of French society, requiring an “ambitious” public policy response.
“People with foreign origins, or perceived of having them, are disadvantaged in terms of access to jobs or housing,” according to a new report from the government’s Defenseur des Droits (Rights Defender) agency led by Jacques Toubon, a former justice minister.
“They are more exposed to joblessness, poverty, poor housing, police ID checks, poor health and educational inequality,” it said.
Yesterday’s report came as France has seen a series of rallies against racism in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States sparked by the killing of Floyd George, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer.
It cited surveys from 2016, the most recent, that found that 11% of respondents reported incidents of discrimination because of their skin colour over the previous five years, up from six percent in 2008.
“Discrimination is not the result of individual responses, a few human resource directors who refuse to hire blacks or Arabs,” Toubon wrote. “It’s the entire system that is to blame.”
He called for the creation of a “discrimination observatory” to better document alleged cases, and national “testing” operations to uncover racial biases in employment and housing markets.
Legal authorities should make it easier to prove discrimination cases in court and ensure that penalties are “genuinely dissuasive.”
The report came after Human Rights Watch said this month that French police have “overly broad” powers “to conduct discriminatory and abusive checks on black and Arab boys and men,” leaving too much room for arbitrary and biased decisions.
Since 1978, France has prohibited the collection of data on a person’s race, ethnicity, or political or religious opinions for the national census or other surveys.
Critics say the policy, meant to underscore equality before the law, prevents the country from a having a better understanding of the inequalities faced by many of its citizens.