EU: Black people face 'entrenched prejudice'

Black people in the European Union continue to face a "pervasive scourge" of racism, including harassment, attacks and police profiling, according to an EU report published Wednesday.

"Almost 20 years after adoption of EU laws forbidding discrimination, people of African descent face widespread and entrenched prejudice and exclusion," Michael O'Flaherty, director of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), said in the foreword to the report entitled "Being Black in the EU."

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The report draws on interviews conducted in 2015 and 2016 with around 5,800 people of African descent in 12 EU countries, including Germany, France and the UK.

Thirty percent of respondents said they had experienced racist harassment in the past five years, and one-fifth said they did so in the last year.

Five percent said they had experienced a racist attack in the past five years, and of those 10 percent were committed by police. 

However, two-thirds of victims of racist violence by police officers did not report the incident, with 28 percent saying they did not report it because they do not trust, or fear, the police.

Lack of trust in law enforcement

Illegal police profiling is also a problem. Around one-quarter of respondents said they had been stopped by police in the past five years. Among them, four in 10 characterized the police stop as racial profiling.

Not only is racial profiling illegal, but it also undermines trust in law enforcement, the report said.

"Overall, respondents rate their trust in the police at 6.3 on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means ‘no trust at all' and 10 indicates 'complete trust,'" the report said.  

Read more: Is 'racial profiling' illegal? Depends on where you live

The FRA report also investigated discrimination in employment, housing and education, with four in 10 respondents saying they felt racial discrimination in these areas in the past five years.

"A particularly unsettling pattern is that younger individuals tend to experience more discrimination and exclusion than older individuals. This renders even more urgent the need for intensified efforts to promote the full inclusion of people of African descent in the EU," O'Flaherty said. 

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