From Dr Elena Moran, chairman, Community Relations Trust.
I WRITE with reference to your report of the recent Education and Home Affairs Scrutiny panel hearing at which the Minister for Home Affairs apparently said that there is no law drafting time for the proposed anti-discrimination law this year or the next.

If this is correct, it will be 2011 at the earliest before this law comes into force. Even then, it has always been suggested that the law should be brought into force in several phases, with the regulations on race discrimination coming first. This means that it could be several years before there is any legislation protecting people against discrimination on the grounds of sex, disability, age or sexual orientation.

I find this lack of priority for the proposed law difficult to fit in with the fine words of the draft Strategic Plan recently published by the Council of Ministers. A repeated theme of the plan is the desire to support people to help themselves. Indeed, one of the five main areas focused on by the plan is ‘enabling people to meet their full potential’.

The plan lists a number of priorities, including to ‘increase social inclusion by encouraging and supporting people to help themselves’. Under this heading can be found the following aspiration: ‘Not every member of our community is able to take advantage of the opportunities the Island has to offer. Our social policies need to promote equal opportunities and access to services so that all members of society can share in the Island’s success.’

The whole purpose of a discrimination law is to promote equal opportunities and help people to meet their full potential. It supports people to help themselves by giving them the legal rights they need to ensure that they are not prevented from getting work or promotion because of their race, sex, age or disability.

It is all very well for the States to exhort people to be nice to each other, but in real life employers discriminate, as do the providers of goods and services. The only way to stop this is to give people a platform of legal rights so that there is a sanction against employers and others who perpetuate discriminatory practices and decrease social inclusion.

By failing to find drafting time for this proposed law, the States are effectively saying that discriminatory behaviour remains acceptable in Jersey. Thus it will remain the case that a person refused a job on the grounds of race has no recourse against the discriminating employer.

It also means that a person who suffers sexual or racial harassment at work will have no claim against an employer who promotes or condones such behaviour. We will continue to see situations where employers impose spurious employment requirements in order to avoid employing people with disabilities. And of course employers will continue to refuse to employ people on the grounds that they are too old or too young or in the case of a woman simply because she is of child-bearing age.

It is all very well for the Council of Ministers to make aspirational statements about inclusion and equality of opportunity. However, if there is a genuine desire to promote equal opportunities so that all members of society can share in the Island’s success, the Council of Ministers should make implementing the draft discrimination law more of a priority.
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