On a brisk winter day in 1992, Rosalind Williams--an African-American woman and naturalized Spanish citizen--stepped off the train at a railway station in Valladolid and was immediately asked to produce her identity document. It was December 6, a national holiday celebrating Spain's new constitution--one of the most modern in Europe. Yet when asked why Williams was the only person on the platform to be stopped, the police officer explained that he was following orders: it was because of the color of her skin.
Williams produced her identity document, and took the number of his badge. Eighteen years later, after winning a landmark ruling from the UN Human Rights Committee on her case, Williams is still waiting for the Spanish government to issue a public apology and end ethnic profiling by police.
Today, racial and ethnic profiling remains a pervasive--and ineffective--practice across Europe. With security concerns heightened, the debate on profiling has only intensified.
At this Open Society Institute forum, Rosalind Williams discusses her personal experience challenging racial profiling in Europe, and what impact she hopes the Human Rights Committee's landmark judgment will have in her adopted homeland. Rachel Neild of the Open Society Justice Initiative talks more broadly about the prevalence of ethnic profiling throughout the European Union, and its ineffectiveness. Neild discusses the steps being taken to document and eradicate ethnic profiling, including innovative projects being carried out in cooperation with Spanish police. Jim Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative--which helped bring Williams' case to the UN Human Rights Committee--moderates.
Bio
James A. Goldston
James A. Goldston is the executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, an operational program of the Open Society Institute that promotes rights-based law reform and the development of legal capacity worldwide.
Previously, as legal director of the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Center, Goldston spearheaded the development of groundbreaking civil rights litigation before the European Court of Human Rights, United Nations treaty bodies, and domestic courts in 15 European countries. In 1996, Goldston served as director general for Human Rights of the Mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, where he oversaw monitoring, reporting and individual protection activities nationwide.
For five years, Goldston was a prosecutor in the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he specialized in the prosecution of organized crime. He previously worked for Human Rights Watch. A graduate of Columbia College and Harvard Law School, Goldston has written widely on issues of human rights and racial discrimination. He has engaged in law reform fieldwork and investigated rights abuses in more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He is a Lecturer on Law at Columbia Law School.
Rachel Neild
Rachel Neild is senior advisor on ethnic profiling and police reform with the Equality and Citizenship Program of the Open Society Justice Initiative. Based in the Washington, D.C. office, Neild previously worked with the Washington Office on Latin America, the Andean Commission of Jurists, Peru, and the Inter-American Institute for Human Rights, Costa Rica.
Neild has also done consultancies on human rights and policing for the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, USAID, and Rights and Democracy, among others.
Rosalind Williams
Rosalind Williams is an African American artist and photography curator originally from San Francisco. She became a naturalized citizen of Spain after marrying the Spanish documentary filmmaker Tino Calabuig in 1968. After experiencing racial profiling by Spanish police in 1992, Williams took her case to court, culminating in a landmark decision by the UN Human Rights Committee in 2009.
Any action, practice, or belief that reflects the racial worldview—the ideology that humans are divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races,” that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural behavioral features, and that some “races” are innately superior to others. Racism was at the heart of North American slavery and the overseas colonization and empire-building activities of some western Europeans, especially in the 18th century. The idea of race was invented to magnify the differences between people of European origin in the U.S. and those of African descent whose ancestors had been brought against their will to function as slaves in the American South. By viewing Africans and their descendants as lesser human beings, the proponents of slavery attempted to justify and maintain this system of exploitation while at the same time portraying the U.S. as a bastion and champion of human freedom, with human rights, democratic institutions, unlimited opportunities, and equality. The contradiction between slavery and the ideology of human equality, accompanying a philosophy of human freedom and dignity, seemed to demand the dehumanization of those enslaved. By the 19th century racism had matured and the idea spread around the world. Racism differs from ethnocentrism in that it is linked to physical and therefore immutable differences among people. Ethnic identity is acquired, and ethnic features are learned forms of behaviour. Race, on the other hand, is a form of identity that is perceived as innate and unalterable. In the last half of the 20th century several conflicts around the world were interpreted in racial terms even though their origins were in the ethnic hostilities that have long characterized many human societies (e.g., Arabs and Jews, English and Irish). Racism reflects an acceptance of the deepest forms and degrees of divisiveness and carries the implication that differences among groups are so great that they cannot be transcended. See alsoethnic group; sociocultural evolution.
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