News

On October 24-25 The European Network Against Racism (ENAR) and the Open Society Foundations held a symposium on equality data collection. 

The aim of both ENAR’s and OSF’s projects on equality data is to ensure that comparable sets of equality data are collected by Member States in respect to EU data protection safeguards, and in order to support equality, social inclusion and non-discrimination policies. The symposium aims to strengthen political will for equality data collection among policy and decision makers at national and local levels.

The meeting gathered representatives of EU Member States, public and private companies, demographers, academics, equality bodies, EU institutions, international organisations and NGOs.

One workshop was on how to work towards an EU level framework on equality data collection, it was facilitated by Michael Pivot, Director of ENAR and Annica Ryngbeck, Policy Officer at Social Platform. Here are some of the points that came out of the discussions:

• We need a legislative EU level framework (this is the only way to guarantee that resources will be put into it) and good practices on data collection can be taken from the work on migration.
• The Member States will not accept an EU legal framework but one way to go about can be to indirectly initiating a European Commission staff working paper to improve the internal coordination and maximizing the effect of what is already being done. An initiative by the Commission must be accompanied by strong follow-up and support by civil society.
• A lot can be done to push the Commission and Member States to collect evidence for data by be clear on the purpose of it. Conditionality for future funding programmes is an important instrument.
• The Fundamental Rights Agency is producing evidence in different areas, which makes it less easy to not do something, their work also shows that it is possible and ‘nothing bad will happen’. Also much of their data is being made available for NGOs and other actors to look further into.
• Statistics is important to show the facts, an example from UK showed how Roma people was incorrectly counted based on number of caravans and assuminptions that all Roma’s lived in caravans, without counting actual people.  
• We should use a wide of arguments in favor of equality data, not only against discrimination but also in order to promote effective services.
• It is also important to carry out campaigns to from a bottom-up approach to inform vulnerable groups why it is important to collect their data.
• The question on whether we should call for equality data on all grounds and on intersecting grounds or just on some – such as on ethnic origin and disability – was also discussed. 

Background information:

Equality data collection refers to the process of gathering disaggregated data – by means of monitoring employment, censuses, surveys, as well as justice and equality bodies’ data processes – in order to quantify discrimination on the ground of race, ethnic origin, religion/belief and disability, among other grounds.

ENAR has identified the need for equality data as a priority for equality advocacy in general. The lack of data has been undermining discrimination claims in court, in NGOs’ and equality bodies’ equality advocacy, and in the effectiveness of public policies tackling discrimination and promoting equality throughout Europe. A number reports – including from the European Commission and the Fundamental Rights Agency – have extensively detailed the reasons why disaggregated data would help advance the non-discrimination agenda. These reasons have been endorsed by most of the equality actors in Europe. Comparable sets of disaggregated data would help by:

• Supporting evidence to prove structural discrimination in court;
• Assessing the effectiveness of corrective measures including EU equality directives and monitoring progress over time;
• Measuring (in)equalities and diversity in the workplace;
• Designing efficient and cost-effective public policies.