MINELRES: UNITED: Third Newsletter on fighting discrimination against minorities in Europe (content)

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Original sender: UNITED <info@unitedagainstracism.org>


UNITED  E-News 13/02/03:
FIGHTING DISCRIMINATIONS AGAINST MINORITIES IN EUROPE
NEWSLETTER 3

This (irregular) Newsletter is compiled from contributions written by
organisations that participated in the UNITED Conference "The Power to
Change: Action and Awareness-Raising Against Racism and Discrimination
in Europe", June 2001.
Previous issues are available on our site
http://www.unitedagainstracism.org (under conferences)

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EDITORIAL

The third number of the Newsletter "Fighting Discriminations against
Minorities in Europe" has the vocation to present some of these
strategies of "fight", on different levels (no only political but also
cultural, social or educational).

However, some of the following articles will show again the dramatic
conditions of minorities which are far from being resolved.

The situation is even worse for communities having Muslim backgrounds
living all around Europe. It seems that the fight against terrorism
launched after the September 11th events has cast a spell over this
particular community.

Instead of calming down the alarmist international conjecture, domestic
legal rules in Europe tend to encourage this fear and create a gap
between the communities, the majority and the minority. We are living in
a serious increase of discriminations and narrow-mindedness in the
European States. The rise of extremist parties is also ongoing and
putting more pressure on the evolution of mentalities.

Therefore, the fight of non-governmental Organisations and civil society
is essential in order to protect the fundamental citizens' rights,
denounce the States' excessive and unfair laws and be the guardians of
Human Rights principles.

This Newsletter aims at informing you about the actual situation of
minorities in each European country and presenting some strategies that
each Organisation has developed to counterattack the States' drastic
acts.

Your Organisation is invited to join us and participate in this
initiative of exchange of information that tells more about the
effective situation than general articles in newspapers. 

Rachida Toudert (France)

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CONTENTS:

- Bosnia and Herzegovina: Education against Discrimination - Some
Experiences from Bosnia and Herzegovina

- Poland: The actions of the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) in
Poland

- RUSSIA: Russian ethnic minorities in 2002

- France: The Sangatte Refugee Camp closed for good

- Calendar and interesting links

A matter of interest: Dossier "Sans-papiers in Europe"
"A series of recent articles on the right of asylum in the United 
Kingdom"

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