Faced with the persisting challenge of racism, Western European states are actively seeking ways of improving the population’s attitudes toward non-White immigrants from developing countries as well as their descendants. However, two main obstacles stand in the way of ambitious anti-racist policy reform. On the one hand, the vastly unequal voting power of native and immigrant-origin citizens, combined with the former’s relative immunity to ethnic discrimination, makes it electorally difficult to keep the issue on the political agenda, especially with the competition of far-right parties trading on xenophobic rhetoric. On the other hand, there is an on-going theoretical dispute between multiculturalists and interculturalists on the long-term link between different approaches to cultural governance and racist attitudes, with the latter favouring a return to some forms of minority assimilation. This thesis explores how the human rights to non-discrimination and education, enshrined in various international treaties, may help overcome both obstacles, and how courts should interpret them in order to take advantage of their anti-racist potential. Since we wish to highlight the law’s relationship with morally problematic social processes, our inquiry is critical and interdisciplinary, combining insights from law, philosophy, political science, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Current legal standards are extracted from the human rights treaties adopted in the framework of the United Nations and the Council of Europe, as well as European Court of Human Rights case law and the General Comments and thematic reports of the United Nations monitoring committees and experts. These authoritative interpretations are contrasted with the recommendations of specialised international organisations, the principles defended by political philosophers and the prescriptions that can be derived from empirical research on the etiology of racism. Our analytical starting point is that human rights delimit the range of legally permissible policies, which in turn affect the structural drivers of racism. Since the relationship between human rights law, policies and attitudes is a highly indirect one that can rarely be observed straightforwardly through correlational or experimental evidence, we primarily rely on a deductive mode of reasoning, using empirically grounded theories to predict the long-term consequences of the law. Our results fall in two different categories targeted at different audiences. On the one hand, we unveil existing human rights standards that could be harnessed in the service of anti-racism. This may be seen as a way of increasing the legal expertise of policymakers, activists and other social agents. On the other hand, we defend the principle of ethnic recognition as a moral argument for modifying current human rights standards or developing new ones. This can be read as an attempt to expand the philosophical and sociological toolbox of judges and other legal practitioners. Starting with the right to non-discrimination, we critically analyse the implementation and institutionalisation of EU employment equality law. In particular, we contend that the complaint-based model of anti-discrimination enforcement, the scarce or misconceived recourse to positive action and the lack of accommodation of cultural differences problematically contribute to ethnic segregation, stratification and assimilation. We then turn the spotlight on the right to education, characterising education policy as a key institutional source of racism among children. More specifically, we claim that only by developing a critical and multi-perspectival curriculum, creating incentives for ethnically mixed schools and extending some public school regulations to private ones will policymakers succeed in establishing egalitarian education systems. The conclusion puts forward a rights-based approach to anti-racist policy reform.
