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Spain: Constitutional court's racial profiling ruling challenged

01 August 2006

On 12 September 2006, a coalition of civil advocacy groups including the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), Women's Link Worldwide and SOS Racismo filed an application before the UN Human Rights Commission concerning a ruling by the Spanish constitutional court in 2001 which appears to condone the use of race as a criterion for police stops. Rosalind Williams Lecraft, an African-American woman with Spanish citizenship, was stopped and asked to show her documents in 1992 in Valladolid train station. When asked why she had been identified while white family members had not, a national police officer answered that he had been told to identify persons who "looked like her" adding that "many of them are illegal immigrants". The Constitutional court's ruling argued that physical or racial characteristics are "reasonable indicators of the non-national origin of the person who possesses them" and "merely indicative of the greater probability that the interested party was not Spanish".

A press statement issued by the OSJI says that the application asks the "Human Rights Committee to make clear that racial profiling is unlawful" and stresses that the case is important "because racial and religious minorities are increasingly being subjected to police stops and scrutiny". It goes on to claim, referring back to a recent report on ethnic profiling in Spain that illustrates the pervasiveness of racial profiling in stop-and-searches by police, that this "was not an isolated event". The grounds on which the application is based are the breach of the plaintiff's right to non-discrimination and freedom of movement.

OSJI press statement, Geneva, 12.9.06, available at: http://www.justiceinitiative.org/db/resource2?res_id=103402; "Ethnic Profiling in Spain: Investigations and Recommendations", Daniel Wagman, July 2006, available in English at:
www.justiceinitiative.org/db/resource2?res_id=103400; and in Spanish at:
http://www.ecln.org/docbin-2006/OSI-profiling-Spain.pdflloc