Orange interviewed Bashy Quraishy, chairman of the European Network Against Racism.
What are the aims of your organization?
We are a network of some 600 NGO’s that work on issues like racism prevention, discrimination, minority rights and gender equality. The network was established in 1996 and now we are further developing our organization by including more NGO’s that might work alone or that might need assistance and cooperation. Basically we advise and inform different institutions like the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the European Parliament and others on issues of ethnic equality and discrimination based on religion, gender or background. We are specialized in issues regarding minorities that come from cultures outside of the EU.
How is your network organized?
We have offices in various countries and our headquarters are in Brussels, but we also cooperate with different NGO’s that operate in other countries, who provide us with fresh information. Right now we are trying to extend our network to the Balkan countries and we have already been in contact with NGO’s from Croatia, FYR Macedonia and Kosovo.
How do you realize your objectives?
Apart from organizing meetings, workshops, publications, cooperations and investigations, we are in strong contact with different European institutions. We lobby them for minority rights. We send them annual reports on human rights matters in all the countries our network members operate in and we take part in meetings organized by them. It is important to know that even though we are often funded by these institutions, we are an independent organisation.
What is the most important current aim of the network?
We are monitoring human rights in countries that want to enter the EU in the future. Apart from this, we are also fighting against etnophobia, islamophobia and romaphobia in some other European countries.
What did you get from this conference?
I had the opportunity to speak EDC/HRE coordinators of different countries and EDC/HRE educators that are here as members of several NGO’s of the DARE network. All the people that I have met, were interested in knowing something about our network and they expressed a strong will to cooperate with us. Together we can work to make Europe more inclusive.
Posted in 2008-11: DARE conference| 20.11.2008
By: Edval Zoto
