Challenges and achievements for fundamental rights in the EU: FRA launches 2014 Annual Report

Today the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA)  has launched its Annual Report: Fundamental rights: challenges and achievements in 2014.

The Annual Report provides concrete and comparative data on the fundamental rights situation on the ground in the 28 EU Member States. In our role as UK Contractor for the FRA, HRLC provided the UK data for the report.

The Report identifies key developments, promising practices, and challenges in many areas of fundamental rights.

These include:

• The worsening plight of migrants. Record number of migrants died in the Mediterranean; there was a fourfold increase in those rescued or apprehended at sea; the processing of migrants at some borders worsened; and public discourse surrounding migrant integration continued to be a challenge. In the United Kingdom no concrete measure for migrant integration or inclusion targeting the general population was implemented in 2014. New EU funding mechanisms were established to help Member States implement EU migration and asylum law, improve solidarity between Member States and help fight cross-border crime. Overall, the Annual report points to the need for an over-arching EU-wide policy that addresses all aspects of migration from cause to effect. The recent European Agenda on Migration is an important step in this regard.

• The persisting challenges in reporting and recording hate crime. The results of FRA’s survey on violence against women, as with previous FRA surveys, for example on antisemitism and on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender hate crime, revealed general feelings of fear and high levels of under-reporting among victims. However, some Member States have made steps to better protect victims of crime by reviewing their laws and policies as the November 2015 transposition deadline of the EU Victims Directive comes closer. In the UK, the Police Service of Northern Ireland set up a telephone line for recording hate crimes in nearly 50 languages and strategies were adopted by the Mayor’s Office for Policing And Crime (MOPAC) and the Welsh Government for tackling hate crime.

• Child protection continues to be under-resourced in many Member States, hindering efforts to better protect child rights in practice. Data show that child poverty and social exclusion rates remains high. In the UK over 30% of children live in poverty or social exclusion. The UK Government responded by issuing the Child Poverty Strategy 2014–17 which focuses on education for children and adult employment. The Strategy has however been criticised by the Children’s Commissioner for England who stated that the resources made available to local authorities for early intervention are insufficient and have been progressively eroded since 2010. Some Member States are improving the legal protection of child victims or children without parental care. The UK Government’s Department for Education opened a consultation on a set of draft regulations that would allow local authorities to delegate children’s services to third-party providers. Consultation respondents expressed concerns about allowing “privatisation” and “profit making” in children’s social care. Accordingly the regulations were amended to allow only non-profit making organisations to carry out such functions. Despite this change commercial companies still appear to be taking over certain child protection services.

Thematic areas covered by the Report are: equality and non-discrimination; racism, xenophobia and related intolerance; Roma inclusion; asylum, visas, migration, borders and integration; information society, data protection; rights of the child; and access to justice including the rights of victims of crime.

The Report also provides two additional focus chapters. The first concentrates on fundamental rights indicators and examines how a rights-based indicator framework could support relevant actors in policy evaluation and design in order to ensure fundamental rights are upheld across the 28 Member States.

The second focus chapter celebrates the fifth anniversary of the coming into force of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (EU) by mapping its use across the Member States.