News / France

UN panel denounces ‘trivialization’ of racism in France

Tuesday, 28 April 2015 11:32 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 28 April 2015 11:52 PM ]

A session of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (file photo)

A United Nations body of independent experts has denounced France’s “trivialization” of hate speech and acts of racism, urging Paris to curtail the soaring trend of violence against foreign communities.

“We see that the principle of equality is not completely reflected... above all due to intolerance and racism,” said Ion Diaconu, the president of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), during a two-day panel discussion of racial discrimination on Tuesday.

Diaconu censured a “certain trivialization of hate speech” in France, citing frequent reports on “massive exclusion,” and “violence against the Roma [minority] committed by both individuals and by the police.”

Meanwhile, Huang Yong’an, a former ambassador of the People's Republic of China and now a CERD expert, said that tourists from his country were often targeted in France, and urged Paris to take “necessary and effective measures to curb the trend of xenophobia and to ensure security and other fundamental rights of foreign people in France.”

The 86th CERD session kicked off on April 27, and the deliberations of the 18-member committee will only be announced publicly after it ends on May 15. The previous review of racism in France was held five years ago.

According to France’s human rights ombudsman, many of France’s 20,000 Roma people, most of whom come from Romania and Bulgaria, live in extreme poverty in makeshift settlements with little or no access to basic services, and at constant risk of forced evictions.

The two-day review of racism in France came after French Prime Minister Manuel Valls unveiled a plan aimed at curbing soaring acts of racism in the country on April 17.

*French Prime Minister Manuel Valls © AFP*

The premier, who had warned that “racism” as well as hatred towards Muslims and foreigners are “intolerably rising” in his country, proposed a three-year plan to form a state unit tasked with monitoring hate speeches on the Internet, calling for focus on specific actions in schools.

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