Background on the OSCE Antisemitism Meeting in Berlin

On April 28 and 29, 2004, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, will meet in Berlin for an extraordinary meeting on antisemitism. Held at the invitation of the German government, the conference is to follow up the OSCE's first ever special meeting on antisemitism, in Vienna in June 2003.

The Berlin Conference will bring together both governmental delegations and a broad spectrum of nongovernmental organizations engaged in the fight against racism and discrimination. The human rights movement will question OSCE members' fulfillment of past pledges to address antisemitism and propose concrete actions for improvement.

The meeting is urgently needed. Discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group has increasingly taken the form of racist threats and violence in a pattern across much of Europe, from Russia to the United Kingdom. This disturbing pattern has included physical assaults on individuals - and fire-bombings, gunfire, window smashing, and vandalism of Jewish homes, schools, synagogues, and other community institutions.

Many European governments are not accurately monitoring, reporting, or effectively combating antisemitic violence, creating a climate that has contributed to the rise of anti-Jewish hate speech and racist violence. Often the official response of governments is silence, or to attribute attacks to common crime or to political protest. The French government made few public statements about the rising tide of anti-Jewish violence in 2002 and early 2003, but has now firmly condemned the violence and taken new measures to monitor and to combat it.

The governments of Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Russia, where many attacks have also occurred, have made public statements condemning the surge in violence. But European governments overall have released little documentation on anti-Jewish violence, and have, according to nongovernmental observers, done too little to abate the rising tide. The U.S. Department of State's own annual reports on human rights conditions and religious intolerance largely echo European governments' uneven reporting on antisemitic violence in Europe.

Governments and civil society alike need to confront antisemitic acts more effectively-as the serious violations of international human rights they are. A unifying principal for the human rights movement is that antisemitism and other forms of racism must be combated by a broad movement of civil society-and not left solely to the communities under threat.