“Few, if any, crises since the Second World War have had such a global impact as the Covid-19 pandemic” on the sectors covered by the Council of Europe’s European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), said its chairwoman, Maria Daniella Marouda, as she presented its 2020 annual report, published on Thursday.
This health crisis has particularly affected marginalised groups, she points out, with the Romani at the forefront of these groups, often confined to overcrowded neighbourhoods where access to public services is limited and compliance with social distancing measures is virtually impossible. They have been affected all the more because distance learning measures have de facto excluded their children from school and sometimes deprived them of social assistance conditional on the schooling of the youngest.
The health crisis also affected migrants and asylum seekers, who were often excluded from health care because they did not have a national insurance number, were deprived of informal jobs due to the economic downturn, and were particularly vulnerable to infection when they were housed in seasonal jobs.
Calls to LGBTI hotlines and victim support call centres increased (in some cases tripled), particularly during curfews and young LGBTI persons have oftentimes been exposed to family rejection and domestic violence during the Covid-19 pandemic
In addition to the negative impact of the pandemic on the fight against racism in 2020, the report notes other key developments: - the Black Lives Matter movement, which resonated in Europe and “revealed the extent to which racial profiling and racist police abuse continue to affect vulnerable groups, reinforcing in Europe concerns of what is increasingly referred to as institutional racism”; - the terrorist attacks which raise fears of a rise in anti-Muslim racism; - the permanence of antisemitism fuelled by neo-Nazis and Islamists; - the rise of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric alongside the emergence of legislation challenging the rights of LGBTI people.
Another area of concern is the use of artificial intelligence, which has been accentuated by the fight against the pandemic. “This digitalisation is potentially discriminatory for populations that do not have access to it and entails risks in terms of the collection of personal data”, Maria Daniella Marouda points out. “We will continue to monitor its impact in conjunction with the ‘Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence set up by the Council of Europe”.
Link to the report: https://bit.ly/2Q9LgSS (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)