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THE BANNER GRAPHIC above comes from the new European Parliament anti-discrimination web site. It is designed to provide an overview of EU policy in this area together with links to the United Nations and the Council of Europe. The European Review ran its mouse around the site to check exactly what was on offer.
The home page is a list of links which includes 'Overview: The European Union and the Fight against Discrimination' which leads to a short summary of EU anti-discrimination laws mainly based on the Amsterdam treaty, article 13. Other links on the home page include 'United Nations', 'Council of Europe' and discrimination on the grounds of 'race', 'religion', 'sexual orientation', 'age' and 'gender' as well as 'bibliography'. We followed some of these links to find that they had a broadly similar structure: a short statement detailing the EU legislative position was followed by a series of links to relevant documents and, sometimes, to outside organisations. The home page links stay on all pages so that they can be accessed from throughout the site.
Typical links from individual pages were 'UNITED STATES Supreme Court decisions on freedom of religion', 'Council Directive 75/117/EEC of 10 February 1975 on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to the application of the principle of equal pay for men and women' and 'European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia'. The 'Bibliography' link leads the user to a useful list of articles on the subject of the page which links to it e.g. from the 'Discrimination on the grounds of gender' page citations articles on gender bias in many languages are accessed. All things considered a stylish and useful site but with one or two quirks which might put off the novice net surfer.
THE INTERNET, AS MOST people know, began in the United States and although the last five years have seen its prodigious growth around the world, including in Europe, most web sites are in America and most web page content originates there. Now EU bosses are worried that Europe is losing out and are proposing a new programme to stimulate 'European Digital Content'. They say that of the 100 most visited web sites 94 are physically located in the U.S. This is thought to be likely to have a bad effect on both linguistic and cultural diversity. Mr Erkki Liikanen, Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society, stated that:'Digital content is an asset of primary importance for Europe. On the economic side content production has given rise to rapid job creation in recent years and can continue to do so. On the social side, production and use of European content fulfils functions such as skills, culture, language diversity'.
However the very diversity of Europe could be used as an asset on the Internet, he continued 'We should turn Europe's rich content base into a competitive advantage in the Information Society and ensure that European operators get a more prominent place on the Internet'. He hopes to facilitate this by removing market barriers such as poor access to finance and obstacles to trade in multimedia rights..eu to join .com and .uk. The European Commission has set out its plans to create a European internet address suffix. It has been campaigning since 1999 for a top level domain name. Examples of these that may be familiar to web surfers are '.com' for international companies and '.co.uk' for British firms. The campaign forms part of the eEurope action plan agreed at the last EU summit.
THE EUROPA WEB site which is the main 'portico' for Internet users wishing to access the EU pages has recorded a substantial fall for April.. Apart from traditional holiday periods in August and December, the trend had been relentlessly upward as more and more people get online. The April figures show a decline in the number of 'hits' (number of documents and images accessed) from 143 to 117 million.
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