One year following its birth, the anti-discrimination platform set up by the Rights Defender, Claire Hédon, fully justified its creation. This telephone and online device, maintained by seven listening lawyers, has been requested 14,000 times in twelve months. A quarter of these appeals concerned discrimination on the basis of origin, another quarter on the basis of disability. These reports resulted in 7,096 cases processed by the Human Rights Defender’s services. “A figure up by 25% and which proves the need for such a device”, emphasizes MI Hedonism.
The anti-discrimination platform, decided by Emmanuel Macron in the wake of the scandal created by the assault of black music producer Michel Zecler by three police officers in Paris in December 2020, plays an educational role (what is discrimination, how to characterize it?) as well as reporting and accompanying victims. To do this, the services of the Defender of Rights can use the 1,200 associative actors – including the 75 legal referents dependent on the Defender of Rights – and institutional identified and mobilizable.
A majority of out-of-court settlements
In the majority (60%) of the approximately 7,000 cases handled, following an adversarial and impartial approach by the services of the Human Rights Defender, mediations lead to an amicable settlement. “What people want is to be recognized and restored to their rights”, estimates MI Hedonism. She thus cites the case of a young disabled woman who had been denied access to a festival because of her disability despite the assurances given on the official website. After mediation, she obtained « refund » and a commitment of the festival “to work on accessibility for the next edition”, detailed the Rights Defender.
When mediation is not successful, the person discriminated once morest may choose to go to court. Or the platform can make a report to the Public Prosecutor’s office. In case of legal proceedings, “the Rights Defender’s opinions are followed by the courts in three-quarters of the cases”, states Claire Hedon. However, criminal complaints are unlikely to succeed because of the burden of proof, which is arranged before the labor and civil justice, where the chances of success are much higher.
The most relevant area is the world of work, which accounts for 50% of the platform’s reports. “Quite often, people who call us think they don’t have evidence, according to a person in charge of the Rights Defender’s services. We are here to help them and show them that they have much more evidence than they believe. » Among the criteria of discrimination, the fact that disability is almost on a par with origins shows how the disability world has been able to mobilize to use the new platform.
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