Racial crime hits new high in the Netherlands, report says

Date: 02/12/04

By Martin Banks

RACIAL crime rose to an “alarming rate” in the Netherlands, according to the annual report of the Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), which is published today (2 December). The statement is based on 2002 data, the last year for which figures are available for the country.

The finding is likely to add to the rising controversy over ethnic problems in the Netherlands, where the recent killing of film-maker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam has sparked violence against the Muslim community.

But racial crime in Germany and France fell in the last 12 months, the report says. In Germany, racist and anti-Semitic crimes fell from 10,902 in 2002 to 6,965 last year. There was a similar decline in France, from 1,313 cases to 817 over the same period.

Another key finding is that while the issue of religious symbols or headscarves in schools is of significance in some of the 'old' EU member states, such as France and Germany, this “does not seem to be an issue of great debate” in new member states.

The study also found that among the groups most vulnerable to discrimination, Roma children are particularly disadvantaged.

The report draws attention to the fact that ways of recording racist and anti-Semitic offences continues to differ widely in the EU, which could distort statistics.

For example, while the Spanish authorities record such incidents, official statistics “greatly under-estimate” racist incidents in Spain. In Greece, the police do not record whether crimes are racially motivated and there has never been a prosecution, it says.

“Such differences can lead to the misleading impression that those countries with better data collection systems have a greater problem with racist crime and violence than those who do not,” the report states.

The Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) published its 2003/2004 annual report on the situation of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism in the European Union, 2 December 2004.

EUMC: Annual Report 2003/04 (Part 2) http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/research/publications/publications_per_year/previous_publications/ar200304_part2_en.htm

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