Fair Trials recently urged the @EU_Commission to take bold action to end structural discrimination throughout Member States' criminal legal systems. A brief thread: https://www.fairtrials.org/news/need-end-structural-racism-criminal-legal-systems

On 19 June 2020, the @Europarl_EN passed a resolution “on the anti-racism protests following the death of George Floyd .” Following this, the @EU_Commission will be releasing an Action Plan on structural racism in September. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2020-0173_EN.pdf

The EU institutions have acknowledged that Black, brown, and other people of colour across Europe are subject to aggressive policing and profiling. However, in States across the European Union, structural racism permeates the entire criminal justice system, not just policing.

Throughout Europe, inequality, poverty, and racial differences are often met with punishment rather than services, support, and other responses. And this happens in discriminatory ways.

Criminal justice systems often are tools of structural racism: they disproportionately target punishment on Black, brown and other people of colour; exacerbate poverty and other issues, and produce disparate consequences for people of colour once in the criminal justice system.

Fair Trials provided the European Commission with the following recommendations for how it may go about developing an action plan for ending structural racism in criminal justice systems, and dramatically shrinking those systems:

1. The Commission’s Action Plan should advance solutions to end structural discrimination in the entire criminal justice system, not just policing.

2. The people impacted by these systems and their communities should lead in these efforts, including in our collective efforts to understand racism in criminal justice systems.

3. The Commission’s approach to criminal justice should be comprehensive (e.g. it should find ways to encourage solutions outside of criminal justice systems so that we may shrink our punishment apparatus).

4. The Commission and other EU institutions must be unequivocal in their commitment to recognising and ending structural racism. One key issue is that Member States deny discrimination in their criminal legal systems. This must end; the EU should lead in changing the discourse.