Event Highlights: Race and Law in Europe
This lecture by Dr. Eddie Bruce Jones, Deputy Dean of the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Race in the Shadow of Law: State Violence in Contemporary Europe (Routledge 2016), took place via Zoom on Thursday, September 24, 2020. A response followed by Prof. Gráinne de Búrca, Florence Ellinwood Allen Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. The event was moderated by Daniela Caruso, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of Europe.
Dr. Bruce Jones began his talk on race, law, and structural racism in Europe with a discussion of the regulatory frameworks at the European level, both within the Court of Justice of the European Union and in the European Court of Human Rights. He want on to discuss some of the challenges of tackling racism and racial discrimination through the legal system in the different member states owing to differing social and linguistic conceptions of race. Finally he turned to the specific example of the Oury Jalloh, still unresolved after 15 years, highlighting the difficulties in accessing legal remedies when the institutions themselves, in this case, the police, are implicated in the injustice.
In her response, Prof. Gráinne de Búrca highlighted the usefulness of supranational mechanisms of justice precisely in these cases where local routes are blocked. The higher courts create a system of external accountability for the systems involved in perpetuating racial discrimination.