The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination have today published their report following their combined 24th and 26th periodic reports of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In an historic development they have noted their ‘concern about reports of racist incidents and ethnic and religious prejudice against Irish persons in Scotland’ and have explicitly recommended ‘that the State party, particularly the government of Scotland, engage with relevant stakeholders, in particular members of the Irish community, to develop measures to effectively address ethnic and religious prejudice in Scotland’.
The Scottish Government are now obliged to undertake the kind of real and meaningful engagement with our community which we have been calling for for decades and particularly strongly since 2018. The explicit and written refusal of the Scottish Government to include the Irish community, among others, in the Anti-racist Observatory – the body to which they are franchising out their race equality obligations - is now starkly at odds with their duty to act on the recommendations of UNCERD.
In a further recommendation, UNCERD stated that the ‘State Party ensure that the devolved governments of Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales….systematically collect and publish comparable statistics on the enjoyment of rights by members of ethnic minorities in all fields of life, in order the identify ethnic disparities, inform policy decisions to eliminate racial discrimination and to evaluate their impact’.
Followers of this site or readers of the Irish Voice will be aware that a statistical report provided by the National Records of Scotland (the government body responsible for the census) for the Expert Reference Group on Covid deaths and ethnicity uncovered the fact that the Scottish Government regards the data on the multi-generational Irish community in Scotland as less than ‘robust’ and used this as the justification for ignoring their own figures which showed that the Irish were, absolutely and proportionately, the ethnic group with the most Covid deaths.
Moreover, when asked by Call it Out what they planned to do to make the data ‘robust’ we were told ‘they had no plans’. Put simply this means that the refusal of the National Records of Scotland to take action to ensure that credible data on our community in all areas of life is collected is directly in conflict with the UNCERD recommendation.
Call it Out welcomes this report and its associated recommendations and will, after due consideration, be approaching the Scottish Government to ascertain how and when they hope to comply with them.
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