FRA Fundamental Rights Report 2022: How Crises Bind the European Union Together
In the recently published Fundamental Rights Report of the Agency for Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the organization addressed the far-reaching impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on people's social rights. It highlights the enormous importance of the European Union and the impact it has on social cohesion.
The European Union's Agency for Fundamental Rights is based in Vienna / Picture: © Flickr / Dimitar Nikolov / [CC BY-SA 2.0(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)]
The European Union's Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), based in Vienna, recently published its FRA Fundamental Rights Report 2022, which describes the far-reaching impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on people's social rights and also presents proposals for addressing the growing inequalities and threats to social cohesion.
The starting point of the report is the many efforts undertaken by the EU in recent years. To counteract the social effects of Covid-19, it has provided more financial support than ever before.
Many people in the EU, especially vulnerable people, have had limited access to healthcare, childcare, education, and the Internet during the pandemic. This has led to excess mortality, poverty, unemployment and social exclusion.
Yet the EU has done a great job of mitigating the crises, which have affected all aspects of daily life. "The response to the Covid 19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine shows how crises bind the European Union together," says FRA Director Michael O'Flaherty.
"EU action and funding can and does make a significant difference - especially when accompanied by relevant legal and political commitments that people's social rights must be upheld. Governments can only ensure a legally compliant recovery from the pandemic if the use of financial resources is effectively monitored. This will also help them adjust funded interventions to provide social protection, especially to the people who need it most: Children and youth."
FRA's Fundamental Rights Report 2022, mentioned earlier, describes developments and shortcomings in the protection of human rights in the EU over the past year.
In doing so, it examines the impact of the pandemic on people's social rights, such as education, employment, and health care, and describes the experiences of children, young people, older people, people with disabilities, and others in vulnerable situations. It also shows how EU countries plan to use the €724 billion the EU has earmarked for recovery from the pandemic to promote social rights.
In the future, governments should involve national human rights or equality bodies in monitoring to ensure that fundamental rights are respected in EU-funded recovery activities.
The objectives to be achieved include, in addition to realizing the social rights of those most affected by the pandemic, evaluating and adapting EU-funded interventions, or ensuring that the use of EU reconstruction funds is not incompatible with either the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union or the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
In addition, topics such as children's rights, which have been affected by the pandemic, or the challenges of migration movements in the EU were also central themes in 2021.
Racism, especially crimes committed with discriminatory intent, both in real life and on the Internet, is also a topic that has been treated with particular care in the report.
The report summarizes and analyzes the main human rights developments in the EU in 2021. The report includes proposals for action in the following areas: EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and its application by Member States; equality and non-discrimination; racism and related intolerance; Roma integration and equality; asylum, borders and migration; information society, privacy and data protection; children's rights; access to justice; and implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.