Dr. Anya Rudiger

Thank you very much, these were two excellent contributions and I'm a bit at a loss as to what to add to that. As I have no quibbles with anything my colleagues said, I can only try to build on it or to elaborate some of the concepts. Firstly, Valerie spoke of harnessing the anti-discrimination discourse for Muslim political action, and she placed that in the context of the absence of the issue of religious discrimination in France, or the novelty of this issue; so one way to start would be to see what exactly it is that is new - and what isn't new, in the wider European context.

At the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, monitoring and, indeed, combating discrimination has been our bread and butter for the past few years. The EUMC is an EU agency set up to monitor racism and all forms of racial discrimination and, as such, we have investigated Islamophobia, particularly after 9/11, and we found increased hostility and abuse of Muslims across Europe. We've published a report on this which some of you may have seen – I've brought some copies as well. We've carried out this research as part of our remit to look at racial discrimination, so we found discrimination and hostility towards Muslims as part of our work on racism. Importantly, we also recognise - and Maleiha has emphasised that very much - that Muslims have long been subjected to discrimination in Europe, not only since 9/11, and this is likely to continue even if the international political situation changes, and even if the media coverage improves. This is because Islamophobia is not just about a climate of suspicion, media frenzy, popular feelings and fears, it's not just an image problem for Muslims and a barometer of our public and political discourse. Instead, if we want to go on using the term Islamophobia we should do so as suggested by the Islamophobia commission set up by the Runnymede Trust five years ago, which emphasised that Islamophobia is about real discrimination faced by European Muslims in their daily lives. Maleiha has outlined very forcefully that structural discrimination against Muslims has existed both before and after 9/11, and I don't have to go over the data again. What she also showed is that this discrimination is significant, and that discrimination against Muslims might now be more severe than against many other minority groups.

For us at the European Monitoring Centre, the interesting aspect is that the factor of religion comes into play here. We're not just confronted with racial discrimination, but some groups, because they are Muslims, face more significant discrimination than others, due to an obvious religious factor. The list of social and economic disadvantages shows that racial and religious discrimination can have almost identical effects, and that's what makes it possible for the European Monitoring Centre to monitor both racial and religious discrimination in the same way.  This also probably implies that we are contributing inadvertently to the ethnicisation of Muslims that some speakers mentioned yesterday. In how far is this a problem? Is religious discrimination simply a form of racial discrimination? Is Islamophobia a specific form of racism? Is it cultural or religious racism?

It does seem that after 9/11 religion has almost surpassed race as the prime side of conflict. While it is no longer acceptable to use skin colour as an immutable attribute to distinguish people, it is now religion and culture that have gained currency as markers of seemingly ‘natural’ signs of difference. Whereas in the past, European Muslims used to be perceived as racial, ethnic or national minorities, now their identity is increasingly marked by their faith. This might not mean anything more than that faith has now become a symbol for race or ethnicity, but there might be more to it. Moreover, religion is often perceived as synonymous with culture, which I think indicates another dimension of prejudice as European Muslims are seen as representing a unified culture that's different from European culture and tied to certain countries of origin. This process of designating another group as the 'other', maybe the European 'other', at first sight seems similar for racial groups and religious groups. But if religion now is this new 'other', or specifically Islam is the new 'other', what is the specificity of religious discrimination?

To answer this I want to come back to points that Valerie raised by distinguishing between discrimination in the public and in the private sphere. We've seen that socio-economic exclusion is almost the same in structure for religious and racial groups, even if discrimination currently affects religious groups more than racial groups. But this is still the public realm we're talking about. The specificity of religious discrimination lies in the role of the private sphere, or at least what is normally, in liberal democracies, regarded as the private sphere: that is discrimination related to faith issues, the failure to accommodate specific religious needs. This issue, if I understood correctly, Valerie designated as the point of tension between the private and the public, and it is a problem for a liberal democracy, such as France, to deal with that while retaining the distinction between both spheres. Obviously, for most Muslims there is no such distinction, and that's not just true for Muslims but also for women and for gays. All these groups pretty much agree that the distinction between the public and the private is a spurious one.

To summarise, while discrimination of religious groups and discrimination of religious practices cannot be fully distinguished from each other and are overlapping, these are two different types of discrimination. The first - discrimination of religious groups - requires a response in the direction of equal rights for all groups, whereas the second, and Valerie has raised that as well, goes more into the area of recognition of specific needs and practices. I think we might face at this point a strategic choice: should we emphasise specificity and difference or should we continue with our struggle for equality, equal rights and anti-discrimination legislation. Personally, I think that because most disadvantages suffered by Muslim communities are not in themselves of a religious nature, even though discrimination is based on their religious as well as racial identity, and because some acts and structures of discrimination are directly related to religious activities or needs but many others are not, this suggests that the issue of equal rights is likely to be more important than the recognition of specific religious needs, though equal treatment of those needs must of course be included in an equality approach. Religion is one aspect among a range of factors which make minority groups appear different and it can add a layer to processes of exclusion or even become a dominant element in these, but it doesn't displace disadvantages encountered on other grounds. The increased hostility against Muslims after 9/11 has been provoked by heightened fear of difference coupled with resentment and disaffection, but it exceeds the focus on a particular religious identity. For example it's quite clear it has produced a dynamic of exclusion that encompasses a range of vulnerable groups that includes other religious minorities, including Jews and Sikhs and Middle Eastern and Arab people more generally, regardless of their religion, and also very much asylum seekers, as we heard yesterday. So I think what is needed to counter Islamophobia and religious discrimination is not so much a renewed focus on the role of faith in our societies, but rather an overarching pursuit of equal rights that acknowledges the existence of conflictual identities and develop modes for accommodating and appreciating difference.

By way of conclusion, I want to briefly summarise what the EU has done to foster such a unified approach to anti-discrimination and equality. We have to acknowledge that the emphasis at EU legislative and policy making level is still very much on racial rather than religious equality. However, there are three approaches that I would highlight as relating to religion. First of all, there is the employment directive, which bans religious discrimination in employment, but as Maleiha said, only in employment, and it also doesn’t require states to set up bodies for equal treatment that can enforce that directive. So that's a small step forward, but there's still a lot that needs to be done to equalize religion and race in legal terms. The second is the draft council framework decision on racism and xenophobia, which is in the criminal law area, which mainly deals with the issue of hate speech and hate crimes, which is - as Maleiha has stressed -  a very contentious issue, especially in the UK. I think the groundbreaking approach in the draft framework decision was to fully include religion in the definition of racism and racial discrimination; and in that form it would have outlawed across Europe incitement to racial hatred, with religion being seen as part of racial hatred, along with a list of other grounds. In the negotiations of this framework decision, the UK was unfortunately leading in turning the punishment of incitement of religious hatred into a voluntary provision. Therefore, the current proposal under discussion at the European Council is one in which incitement to racial hatred will be outlawed throughout the European Union, but with regard to religious hatred, member states may or may not punish this. This approach would be reviewed in two years’ time. The third issue I would like to mention just briefly relates to the new constitutional treaty that the EU will soon have. The European Convention has been meeting to discuss this for the last one and a half years and will be reporting in the summer. There's been a debate in the Convention about whether to include, as one of the paragraphs of the constitution, a reference to Europe's Christian tradition. I don't think this will actually happen, but that there's even the possibility that the Convention would discuss this does show that there are severe problems at EU level when it comes to the issue of religious diversity.

How are these developments reflected at national level? I agree with Valerie that the national context still matters, and we have to see how EU level measures are being discussed and implemented at national level. Firstly, and that's the really positive development, the anti-discrimination Directives mean that for the first time we will now have common minimum standards for protection from racial discrimination in all spheres, and from religious discrimination in employment. We shouldn't underestimate this achievement, especially if we look at the situation in France where, as Valerie outlined, religious discrimination has not been an issue, but also in the UK, where we have a strong Race Relations Act, but if you look at the whole body of legislation in the UK we actually see a hierarchy of protection both in civil and in criminal law, with Muslims are hardly protected at all, whereas, as Maleiha said, Sikhs and Jews receive protection as ethnic minorities. Clearly, a lot needs to be done in the UK to eliminate this sort of state sanctioned discrimination.

Secondly, I also want to touch briefly on the negative convergence at EU level that we've already spoken about yesterday. It's worth highlighting this again, because we have been referring to the US as a bad example lots of times, with a view to the situation of Muslims there. But we should acknowledge that Europe really hasn't made much progress either, and in the UK the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 provides a particularly good or, I should say, bad example. The citizenship provisions have been significantly tightened, with new language requirements for the acquisition of citizenship, and if you are a dual citizenship holder you can be deprived of your British citizenship on the discretion of the Home Secretary. Then, of course, we have the anti-terrorism act, which makes possible the detention of foreign nationals. We also need to be realistic and look at immigration practice, not just codified legislation. When we consider an article such as that which appeared a few days ago in the Guardian, about the disproportionate rejection of visa applications for family visits by Muslims in South Asia, we need to admit that there is plain discrimination in practice by immigration officials.

Therefore, we need to look at both positive and negative convergence at EU level, which impacts on national action. Just very briefly, here are two ideas for ways forward: Firstly, we need to bring the anti-discrimination agenda to bear on immigration, asylum and anti-terrorism legislation, so that we grasp their racial and the religious components. Secondly, we need to equalise protection from discrimination so that it's available to all groups. Valerie has stressed that there is a list of grounds of discrimination that is being continuously extended and that is a very good thing and we need to support that process. There shouldn’t be a hierarchy between race and religion, and indeed between other grounds. There is no reason why we should have laws against racial discrimination but not against religious or indeed sexual orientation discrimination. These issues all need to be tackled without instituting a new hierarchy. In Britain an equality bill was introduced in the House of Lords that we should all support, because it equalises protection for all groups. That is one way forward.