Denmark and racism

In these days, several Danish ministries are presenting this year’s report on their actions in relation to the Convention for the Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination to the so-called treaty body of the UN, the Commission for the Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). After reading the article in Politiken yesterday, stating that Danish society is up for “another exam on racism” in front of an international organisation, I felt something was missing. The article mentioned several reports dating back to 2004 in which the legal and institutional practices of the Danish government in this field have been criticised. However, the article does not specify the differences between the institutions that are researching, commenting and criticising. Earlier this year, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) published a highly critical report on Denmark, and the Danish Prime Minister rejected the findings of the Commission outright due to the plethora of ‘factual inconsistencies’ of the report. He was talking about numbers and figures. The nature of the ECRI’s criticism is fundamentally different from what will come out of the meeting with the CERD, and in my opinion this is a crucial point to make when talking about the monitoring activities of the different organisations.

The ECRI is a commission under the Council of Europe (Europarådet), the primary human rights organisation of Europe. The Council of Europe was established shortly after the Second World War with the prime purpose to secure human rights in its Member States which presently counts 46 including both Turkey and Russia which might not normally be understood as ‘European’. The Council of Europe is frequently misunderstood to be linked to the European Union but despite the cooperation in many fields of politics, the two organisations are distinct and profoundly different organisations. The difference is especially seen in the focus of their work. It was the Council of Europe that drafted and adopted the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) in 1951; the European Union has no such document although it is currently trying to adopt a Constitution which incorporates the ECHR as a separate part of the document. The Council of Europe has proven to the most effective regional human rights system in the world (compared with American and African counter-parts who have similar functions but fail to achieve success in creating institutional and legal stability so to speak in the field of human rights). This is mainly due to the refined workings of the Court which has consistently improved its legal practices through a steady development of case-law in relation to the changing make-up of Europe and its controversial issues. The ECRI was established in 1997 as a response to the ‘right-turn’ of European politics in general and the acceptance in European populations of prejudiced and racist discourse in the public sphere. The ECRI is not a monitoring body as such – it is an expert commission which tries to disentangle the institutional, economic and social dynamics that cause, create or justify hostility towards minorities.

The CERD on the other hand is a UN monitoring body, and the subject of its monitoring is the implementation of the Convention for the Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination. This convention was also drafted and adopted after the Second World War, but has a narrow scope towards racial discrimination i.e. it does not provide a fixed framework within which to deal with discrimination based on for example religion. It monitors the effect of the legally binding convention signed by the Member States of the UN and issues recommendations to the governments of these states. The material up for discussion in the CERD is reports provided by the governments themselves, or their specialised institutions in the field of discrimination. States are obligated to submit reports every 3-4 years. Thus, what is up for discussion this week in the CERD is the Danish government’s self-image. This is not to say that the CERD blindly takes the word of the governments as truth; it is a critical body of experts who questions the account provided by the institutional representatives. However, it is focused on the institutional practices of a state and does not deal with the wider context of a more social and popular nature. Discussions concern new legislation, policy changes and the general ‘philosophy’ behind the political agenda.

The point of all this was to emphasise the differences between the activities of organisations dealing with racism and discrimination on an international level. When the ECRI published its third report on Denmark in May, it created uproar in the Danish public on both sides of the ideological gap. The ECRI has the authority to be a lot more critical than the CERD and it has a wider basis for criticism due to the nature of its research (including NGOs for example). Furthermore, it is directly linked to the activities of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights, hence the power of its recommendations have direct influence on the political make-up of Europe as opposed to the CERD which centralised functions may be important but not sufficiently linked to a political authority with implementational power.