EU Seeks Powers to Fight Hate as Gaza Draws Anti-Semitic Protest
By Brian Parkin Jul 31, 2014 9:37 AM ET
Germany, France and Italy want to hand police increased powers to combat antisemitism and xenophobia after racist taunts and banners marked recent demonstrations over the Gaza conflict.
European governments need more tools to clamp down on protests that are judged to “cross the line,” deputy foreign ministers from the three states said late yesterday after a meeting in Berlin. Antisemitic chants and banners that marked protests in Europe this month as the military conflict in Gaza unfolded highlighted gaps in law enforcers’ powers, they said.
“Anti-semitic or xenophobic rhetoric and hostility have no place in our society,” Michael Roth, Harlem Desir and Sandro Gozi, the respective German, French and Italian ministers for Europe Affairs said in a joint declaration.
Thirteen years after the trade bloc kicked off efforts to set out a common criminal approach for tackling racism and xenophobia, members still differ in the effectiveness of policy. Some countries are guilty of “denying, condoning and grossly trivializing certain crimes,” the EU Commission said in a Jan, 27 report.
The European Union proposed a policy framework for fighting xenophobia and racism in 2001 and it was adopted in 2008. Still, its implementation has been patchy, partly due to the states’ diverging legal systems, said the commission in the same report. It’s also not clear how some provisions should be squared with the right to freedom of expression in the bloc’s human rights conventions.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-31/eu-seeks-powers-to-fight-hate-as-gaza-draws-anti-semitic-protest.html