Equality and Citizenship
The Justice Initiative combats discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, and promotes the right to citizenship. Although national and international law forbids discrimination on a growing number of grounds, the struggle for equality is far from over. Despite an international consensus against it, governments continue to perpetuate discrimination by ignoring or selectively enforcing legal prohibitions.
The Justice Initiative is committed to exposing, documenting and challenging discriminatory practices, whether overt (such as the demolition of Roma houses by Russian authorities) or more subtle (such as ethnic profiling by police in much of Europe). Acting with local lawyers and advocacy groups, the Equality and Citizenship Program works towards enforcement of non-discrimination standards through advocacy, litigation and research.
Following are several examples of work in the area of equality and citizenship:
Using the Courts
The Justice Initiative is pursuing litigation to combat racial discrimination in a number of jurisdictions. In Russia, the Justice Initiative filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of 33 Roma whose homes in the Kaliningrad region were bulldozed and set afire by police and local government officials yelling racist insults and threatening them with machine guns. The application seeks a declaration by the court that the Russian government has breached numerous provisions of the European Convention of Human Rights.
The Justice Initiative is also co-counsel, with the European Roma Rights Centre, in D.H. and Others v. Czech Republic, a landmark case before the Strasbourg court that seeks to end the practice—common in several Central and East European countries—of segregating Roma children in schools for the mentally disabled, regardless of their actual intellectual abilities.
The Justice Initiative is co-counsel in Rosalind Williams v. Spain, the first-ever legal challenge to racial profiling filed with an international human rights tribunal—in this case, the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Williams v. Spain contests a ruling by the Spanish Constitutional Court which held that police could target blacks for identity checks because racial appearance is a proxy for immigration status. In highlighting the problem of racial profiling in Europe, the case seeks clarification that race may not be used as a criterion in police stops.
The Justice Initiative’s Contemporary Discrimination in Europe project pursues litigation in national and European courts to realize the potential of new EU equality directives and highlight the use of law as a tool for positive change. A particular focus is discrimination against Muslims or people perceived as Muslims, whether rooted in racial prejudice, religious intolerance, or competing visions of gender equality.
Documenting the Problem
Discrimination by law enforcement officials and the phenomenon of ethnic profiling are widespread by little understood. In Russia, the Justice Initiative conducted a study of ethnic profiling by police in Moscow that found rampant discrimination. The study, published as Ethnic Profiling in the Moscow Metro, documented a stunning disparity: Moscow Metro riders who look non-Slavic are over 20 times more likely to be stopped by police than riders who look Slavic. The Justice Initiative is now engaged in a similar study of police practices on the Paris Metro.
The Justice Initiative publication “I Can Stop and Search Whoever I Want”: Police Stops of Ethnic Minorities in Bulgaria, Hungary and Spain presented the findings from research carried out by the Justice Initiative and its national partners which established that police officers in all three countries subject Roma and immigrants of ethnic minority origin to ethnic profiling. The report is part of an ongoing, multi-pronged effort to raise awareness of the prevalence of ethnic profiling by police throughout Europe. The Strategies for Effective Stop and Search project, another major component of Justice Initiative antidiscrimination efforts, seeks to improve police relations with minority communities, including Roma, through more accountable and effective use of police stops, identity checks, and searches.
Focus on Citizenship
Equal treatment is an especially difficult challenge where citizenship is concerned. Because states traditionally enjoy broad discretion over access to citizenship, and citizenship is a foundation for the exercise of many rights, people not recognized as citizens are especially vulnerable to discrimination. Today, the human right to citizenship—that is, the right to belong to a nation state and enjoy its protections—is under threat as never before.
Around the world, racial and ethnic minorities are increasingly denied or stripped of citizenship through mass expulsion, legislation, arbitrary administrative action, or the application of insurmountable bureaucratic requirements, in direct contravention of Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Discrimination based on citizenship fuels the growth of statelessness in countries as disparate as Bhutan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Latvia. Stateless individuals are often subject to deportation without notice. They wield no political power, and are unable to participate in the most fundamental civic decision-making processes. They are systematically deprived of public goods and services such as health care, education, and housing. Lack of documentation often prevents them from obtaining gainful employment, resulting in a cycle of poverty for generations. In parts of Africa, the ethnicization of citizenship has created de facto stateless populations that contribute to conflict by taking up arms and crossing borders.
The Justice Initiative is responding to the crisis of statelessness with a comprehensive approach that seeks to implement existing legal norms prohibiting discrimination and arbitrary deprivation of nationality, while promoting an effective international framework to guarantee the universal right to citizenship.
Promoting International Norms
Working with a growing number of NGOs, the Justice Initiative has developed resolutions on statelessness and promotes their adoption by international bodies such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the African Union.
The Justice Initiative filed a brief as amicus curiae to help secure a landmark ruling in 2005 from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). In the case of Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico v. Dominican Republic the court ruled that racial discrimination in access to nationality constitutes a breach of the American Convention of Human Rights.
The Justice Initiative is working to ensure implementation of a landmark judgment of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights on the arbitrary denationalization and expulsion of black Mauritanians. Tens of thousands of black Mauritanians were rounded up by police and soldiers, stripped of their identity documents and forced across the border into Senegal, where they now live in refugee camps. Together with the African Commission, the Justice Initiative is documenting the human rights violations suffered by the expellees, seeking to bring Mauritania into compliance with the Commission's judgment.
Other cases are now being prepared, and two cases are pending before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights on behalf of stateless populations in Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire.
Contact
Julia Harrington: info@justiceinitiative.org
Tel: +1 212-548-0169
Fax: +1 212-548-4662