The latest figures on racist violence in the EU underline the need for a Europe-wide response, according to the chairwoman of the EU body set up to monitor racism.
"It underlines the need to review the legislation in Ireland, and throughout the EU," said Anastasia Crickley, the Irishwoman recently chosen to head the European Monitoring Committee oRacism. She was speaking to The Irish Times on the eve of a meeting of the committee in Dublin today.
Members of the committee will be discussing the decision of the EU Council of Ministers to extend its mandate to cover fundamental rights in the EU.
This would make it the EU committee on human rights, and, if the charter of fundamental rights in the proposed EU constitution is passed, the committee would have responsibility for its implementation, and for addressing EU institutions on human rights matters.
Yesterday Ms Crickley stressed the importance of the committee also continuing and deepening its work on racism. It has just published a report on the incidence of racist violence in the 15 member states in the four years prior to enlargement.
This shows very wide variations among the states surveyed, she pointed out.
However, it found that these differences related to the quality of the data in the different states, rather than to the incidents.
"It looks as if the countries with the best monitoring had the worst incidence of racist violence, but this was not necessarily the case," she said.
Ireland, along with the UK, Denmark, Finland, France and Sweden, had "good or excellent" mechanisms for collecting data on racist incidents, while Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain had "inadequate or non-existent" data.