Despite the groundbreaking antidiscrimination legislation recently transposed into law in the European Union, there remains a gap between the legal protections afforded to individuals on paper and their implementation on the ground. Most minority groups in the EU say they experience some form of discrimination, yet few report these incidents to authorities—either because they believe that nothing will change as a consequence, or because they simply are unaware of their legal options.

Eighty percent of immigrants and minorities surveyed by the 2009 European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey (EU-MIDIS) were unable to name a single organization capable of offering support to victims of discrimination in their country of residence, and few had heard of the European Union’s equality bodies—the flagship institutions tasked with promoting equal treatment in the EU.

While the mechanisms enabling individuals to protest incidents of discrimination have become more sophisticated in the past ten years, they have limited utility if vulnerable populations do not avail themselves of their legal options. Ten years after the passage of the European Union’s hallmark antidiscrimination legislation—the 2000 Racial Equality Directive (RED)—it is worthwhile to examine the extent to which this legislation has made a difference in the lives of those it was designed to protect, and what aspects of its implementation can be improved by Member States.

As governments and communities recover from the deepest economic crisis in decades, anecdotal evidence of racial violence and xenophobia in Europe abounds. The July 2010 expulsions of Roma from France; the January 2010 race riots between locals and African immigrants in Rosarno, Italy; the December 2009 “White Christmas” operation urging residents to denounce unauthorized immigrants in northern Italy; and the November 2009 referendum in Switzerland in which a majority voted to ban the construction of minarets all point to increasing anxiety vis a vis foreigners.

These anecdotes suggest that some societies—for instance those feeling the most negative repercussions of the crisis—could reach a tipping point where immigrants and minorities are once again scapegoated. It is within this context that this paper seeks to closely examine the laws designed to mitigate these trends, through an examination of the statutory bodies put in place to combat discrimination in EU Member State: the EU equality bodies.