European minorities suffer more discrimination as crisis bites

BRUSSELS - Steph is in her last year of translation studies at the Superior Institute of Translators and Interpreters in Brussels, one of the more prestigious schools of its kind in Europe.

In the last few weeks, the hard-working 25-year-old who speaks French, English and Spanish fluently has been looking for a new apartment in the European capital. After visiting some 20 flats, she thought she had found just the right place in a great location not far from the institute.

She had spoken to the landlady on the phone, who had seemed very nice and welcoming. "Everything was perfect. I felt she trusted me. There was an agreement with the previous tenant who was going to leave some furniture for me and a bed. She said it was okay and that I could move in."

"We'd only spoken on the phone though and she wanted to meet me in person."

So Steph turned up to the apartment having made an appointment to meet the lady on the pavement outside the building. But when she approached the owner, she looked surprised, wondering why Steph had come up to her.

"'I'm the girl on the phone,' I told her."

The owner's face changed completely. She said abruptly: "You're black."

And then, even more bluntly: "I'm sorry, but I can't rent to you. I've had too many problems with black people. It's out of the question."

Astonished at the naked racism the previously friendly woman was displaying, Stephanie Bilumbu-Nfaka, whose family brought her to Belgium when she was five years old from a Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) that was becoming dangerously unstable, broke down crying on the pavement.

"I asked why, as she'd been so nice on the phone," she told EUobserver. "She said: 'I never imagined you were black because you speak such good French'."

Trying to calm the young translator in training, the woman said: "Well, maybe you can rent it, but I'll have to talk to my husband and you would have to pay two months' deposit instead of one."

Steph initially agreed to the demand in order to get the flat, but later recovered her pride and decided she was not going to take it.

"She just saw me as a black woman, not a student or a translator or someone who'd lived in her previous apartment for five years without any trouble. I was just reduced to my skin colour. All my principles, values, everything I was had no meaning to her."

But her stance was moot in the end, as she received a telephone call the next morning from the lady to say that her husband was adamant that they were not going to rent the apartment to someone who was black.

Age, disability

Steph eventually found an apartment, one even better than the flat that had been put for rent by the bigoted landlady, but her story is a common one across Europe, as this year's European Commission survey of discrimination in the EU shows. And the situation is worsening, particularly amongst the young as the financial crisis pinches.

Europe's markets may have turned a corner, but most economists warn that the effect of a crisis on wages and employment can extend for quite some time after the economy has begun to grow again on paper.

According to the European Commission report published on Monday (9 November), some 16 percent of citizens across the bloc - or one in six - report having experienced some form of discrimination, whether on the basis of race, gender, age, disability, religion or sexual orientation, roughly the same level as in 2008.

However, when surveyors ask members of minority groups only the same question, instead of all Europeans, they find that there has been a moderate increase in discrimination across most categories and a sharp jump in the number of gays and lesbians who have experienced such problems. They also worry that age and disability discrimination is on the increase.

The reported rate of experienced ethnic discrimination stands at just three percent when the surveyors consider all Europeans, but at 25 percent - from 23 percent in 2008 - when asking those from ethnic minorities.

Disability discrimination has climbed upwards slightly as well. Some 33 percent of disabled people feel they have been discriminated against in the past year, up from 31 percent in 2008.

Many more Europeans of all abilities in 2009 say that disability discrimination is widespread, on 53 percent, up from 42 in 2008.

There has been a marked increase in the perception that age discrimination is rampant, with 58 percent of Europeans believing this to be the case, up from 42 percent in 2008.

"There is also a clear link with the current economic situation, with 64 percent of people expecting the downturn to lead to more age discrimination in the job market," the commission survey said.

"This may reflect rising unemployment among young people in many EU countries as a result of the slowdown."

And where last year, an eighth of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people said that they had experienced discrimination, in 2009, that number was up to almost a quarter, on 23 percent.

The surveyors did warn that because so few individuals in the poll admitted to being gay or lesbian or from some other sexual minority, the huge jump could not be verified. Only 255 people out of the surveyed 26,756, or 0.0095 percent identified themselves as such, far lower than the estimated 10 percent of any population that is homosexual, a fact that itself suggests substantial extant homophobia.

Roma, migrants under the boot

The day the survey was published, global human rights campaign group Amnesty International criticised European countries for the rising tide of discrimination and rights abuses against migrants and minorities.

"The signature response of Europe now to the challenges of migration is to turn the continent into a fortress," said Nicola Duckworth, a director with the organisation, using the occasion of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to compare the extension of human rights to those who had lived behind the Iron Curtain the the discrimination that is common practice today against refugees, other immigrants and minorities such as the Roma.

"People fleeing poverty, violence or persecution in other parts of the world have literally been pushed back into the sea."

"Shamefully, the fruits of 20 years of economic growth and greater political unity since the fall of the Berlin Wall have not been shared equally by all. Serious and deep-rooted problems of racism and discrimination remain at the heart of modern Europe," she continued, highlighting the systemic discrimination faced by the Roma people in eastern Europe.

"[They] were often the first to be excluded from employment as state owned enterprises were privatised. Unlawful forced evictions are driving them deeper into poverty."

In some countries such as Slovakia and the Czech Republic, Roma children continue to be over-represented in schools for pupils with mental disabilities, and to be segregated in Roma-only schools and classes offering substandard education.

The EU survey did not investigate the incidence of discrimination against migrants or Roma.