Racist violence 'increasing'

2003-09-20 16:13

Vienna - The head of the European anti-discrimination watchdog said in an interview published on Saturday that racist violence and anti-semitism are increasing in nearly all the countries of the European Union.

Beate Winkler, the director of the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, said the problem of anti-semitism was particularly worrisome in France, where last year "62 percent of violent acts had an anti-semitic context."

"Generally, racist violence is increasing in nearly all the countries of the European Union," she said in an interview with the magazine Kurier.

She did not give specific figures. These will be included in the centre's annual report in December.

Winkler said the number of incidents attributed to the extreme right in Germany was declining, but cases of violence there were on the increase. The problem was aggravated, she said, by some 3 000 extreme-right sites that have proliferated on the internet.

- AFP