Ethnic Profiling in Spain Persists, Despite Landmark Ruling

One year ago today, the United Nations Human Rights Committee issued a landmark judgment in the Rosalind Williams Lecraft v. Spain case, finding that police identity checks motivated by race or ethnicity run counter to the international human right to nondiscrimination.

In 1992, Rosalind Williams, a Spanish citizen of more than 25 years, was stopped by police and asked for her identity documents solely because she was black. She challenged that policy, but in 2001, the Spanish constitutional court approved reliance on physical or racial characteristics to determine a person’s non-national origin, essentially arguing that one can safely assume that people who aren’t white probably aren’t Spanish.

The court’s endorsement lent legitimacy to a pervasive discriminatory policy of ethnic profiling that had for years been widely documented by human rights monitoring bodies. While white foreigners pass under the radar according to these criteria, black and Asian citizens are perceived as foreigners and repeatedly stopped for immigration checks.

Last year, the UN Human Rights Committee rejected this practice, ruling that while identity checks can be carried out for protecting public safety, preventing crime, and controlling illegal immigration, the physical and ethnic characteristics of people targeted cannot be considered indicators of potentially illegal immigration status and cannot serve as justification for identity checks.

The Committee ordered the Spanish government to provide Williams with an effective remedy, including a public apology, and to take all necessary steps to ensure that Spanish officials do not repeat the kinds of acts observed in this case.

How much has changed in the past year?

Not much.

Although the Spanish government gave some publicity to the Committee’s decision and issued private, closed-door apologies to Williams, it has yet to accept any public responsibility for the discriminatory treatment she received at the hands of Spanish police officers, or offer Williams effective remedies such as payment of damages and reimbursement of legal fees.

The government’s refusal to accept responsibility for discriminatory actions extends beyond the individual case of Williams, however. In communications with the Human Rights Committee and Williams’ counsel—the Open Society Justice Initiative and Women’s Link Worldwide—government representatives have repeatedly characterized Williams’s experience as a relic from the past, an abandoned practice from a time when Spain was not so multicultural or so welcoming of its foreign residents. In this way, the government has tried to argue that the basic human rights and nondiscrimination training received by Spanish police officers is sufficient to prevent ethnic profiling. It claims that what Williams experienced in 1992 would not happen today.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ethnic profiling continues to be a persistent, pervasive and under-addressed problem throughout Spain, despite the fact that several police forces have adopted innovative measures to identify, monitor and address ethnic profiling in their jurisdictions. This is especially true in the context of immigration control, the law enforcement area with which the UN Human Rights Committee was particularly concerned in the Williams case.

In the past year, it has been revealed that the National Police in Madrid have received specific directives to target particular nationalities for immigration roundups. These orders omitted any instruction to abstain from the very practice condemned by the Human Rights Committee in Williams—the use of specific physical or ethnic characteristics as a proxy for noncitizen status.

In addition, a January 2010 memo issued by a top Ministry of Interior office prompted the largest union of National Police officers in Spain to raise serious concerns, as officers were expected to fulfill immigrant expulsion quotas by carrying out massive identity checks in public places where immigrants were supposedly known to travel or congregate. As the unions pointed out, these wide-scale general operations suggest that many persons are being targeted for stops and even detentions on the basis of what they look like. When two of the largest police unions in the country publicly called for a police strike last month, one of their rallying cries was the need to abandon the policy of massive and often illegal identity checks.

Despite the preponderance of proof that police are singling out people who “look like” immigrants for identity checks, government officials within the Ministry of Interior continue to deny that such practices even exist. The efforts of civil society, jurists, and even police unions to engage the government in substantive discussions on how to improve the situation have been met with stonewalling and silence.

The Spanish government should not be allowed to defy the Human Rights Committee’s judgment and continue these policies of mistreatment. Instead, there are clear steps it should take to set things right.

To start, the Spanish government should officially instruct all police forces that they are not permitted to take into consideration race, ethnicity, or other physical characteristics when deciding who to stop for an identity check or search, except when they have specific, reliable information on a particular suspect. Such instructions should be followed up with operational trainings and instructions specifically aimed at decreasing ethnic profiling.

In addition, the Ministry of Interior should expand on local initiatives that have successfully challenged ethnic profiling in Spain, such as the documentation effort launched in 2008 by both the Fuenlabrada and Girona municipal police departments.

Finally, through the new equality law currently under consideration, the government should require police forces to regularly identify and address patterns of discrimination, especially in identity checks.

If Spain wants to make real progress in improving public safety and police effectiveness, while burnishing its reputation as an increasingly diverse and vibrant place, the way forward is clear.