EU institutions urged to redress ethnic mix

Each of the EU’s three main institutions are failing in efforts to achieve “basic” equal opportunities, it has been claimed.

UK Socialist MEP Claude Moraes says the one distinguishing feature about the European commission, parliament and council is that each is predominantly “white”.

Moraes, a former head of the commission for racial equality in the UK, has called on the EU and its institutions to take “positive” action to remedy an “unacceptable” situation.

“Apart from myself, only eight of the 785 MEPs are non-white. Clearly, that is not representative of society,” he says.

The eight are French Socialists Harlem Desir and Kader Arif and their compatriot, Tokia Saifi (EPP-ED) along with four UK members,  Neena Gill (PES), Sajjad Karim (ALDE), Nirj Deva and Syed Kamall (both EPP-ED), and Belgian Socialist Said El Khadraui.

Moraes says that many of the 27 EU member states do not have any non-white MEPs despite significant ethnic minority populations in countries such as Italy (78 MEPs) and Spain (54 MEPs).

Moraes, a member of parliament's civil liberties committee, also says that the proportion of people from ethnic minorities employed in the general workforce of each institution is woeful.

“The three main EU institutions have failed to adopt the most rudimentary procedures procedures to increase the number of visible ethnic minorities who work in the commission, parliament and council," he said.

“Visitors to the institutions from my constituency in London are always surprised by how white these institutions are when they see how diverse our big cities, including Brussels, are.”

Moraes says that one of the problems is that, currently, there is no systematic or  reliable method of recording employees from ethnic groups.

“We do not need positive discrimination or quotas if we adopted positive action measures, such as confidential voluntary ethnic monitoring,” he added.

He says monitoring is a basic recording of the background of the workforce and one which is widely accepted by British companies and institutions.

"It shows you where you are going wrong and then you can put something in place to correct it."

"We have to ensure that recruitment is fair. For instance, where do the institutions advertise, are people with merit from non-traditional backgrounds able to access jobs here?"

Moraes says that 2007, which has been designated European year of equal opportunities, presents an ideal chance to "redress historical and structural discrimination".

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