EU Agency for Fundamental Rights released 2012 Annual Report

European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), published 2012 Annual Report. The re-port, which covers developments in fundamental rights within 27 EU Member States and Croatia throughout 2012, examines the impact of economic crisis on rule of law. The Annual report conveys the Member States have adopted advanced measures in their penal code in order to ensure fight against racism and xenophobia. The report outlines measures taken as racism, xenophobia and intol-erance motivated crimes were to be defined more precisely or a rather deterring penal code was to be introduced for crimes perpetuated with racist and xenophobic motivations.

The economic crisis in Greece led the immigrants and minority groups be seen as scapegoat

The report provides an in-depth analysis on illegal immigration in Greece, which has been looked into as one of the outcomes of the economic crisis. According to the report, which indicates the economic crisis having its impact heavier on the society throughout 2012, the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Rights of the Child report on Greece expresses concerns on the children of the families who lost their source of income thus, are deprived of access to social security benefits. The report recommends EU Institutions and Member States to recognise the severity of the situation in order to adopt preventive measures and act in a timely and decisive manner in order to avoid the spill-over effects of the extreme right tendencies which, together with the economic crisis in Greece, had been a great facilitator to generate a public opinion on migrants and minority groups as scape-goat.

Greece scores quite poor in justice!

Given concerns on some EU Member States’ compliance with rule of law, “justice scoreboard” set up to monitor the developments in the Member States lays out striking figures for Greece. The re-port informs European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) concluded that the Court found at least one violation in 52 cases against Greece, while this included one violation of the right to a fair trial. In addition, 35 cases were indicated as violation of ECtHR decisions in relation to length of pro-ceedings.

In line with these figures, Greece was marked as one the top five EU Member States with bad per-formance in justice, which is defined by violations in implementing ECtHR decisions.

You can access FRA Annual Report 2012 on http://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/annual-report-2012_en.pdf