The widespread and discriminatory enforcement of minor offenses has major consequences for poor, racialized, and migrantized communities across Europe.

Every year, millions of people across Europe are sentenced to minor offenses. They are punished for public order, traffic-related, drug, migration, or other low-level offenses. Some enforcement is aimed at removing people perceived as “undesirable” from public places. In other cases, people are sanctioned for so-called poverty-offenses such as riding the train without a ticket or petty theft.

The most common sanction is financial penalties, which low-income people cannot pay, at times leading to jail. Their debts impede access to basic necessities, including food, electricity, housing, education, and employment, and harm overall health and well-being. People may also be sentenced to severe sanctions such as probation or prison. Regardless of the sentence, criminal convictions are a barrier to a more secure migration status. Taken together, these practices and policies mean that people remain trapped in their circumstances, exacerbating inequities in entire families and communities, as people (often women) band together to support their loved ones.

What’s more, the harms of these practices are unequally distributed. People are routinely and discriminatorily targeted by enforcement for minor offenses because of their poverty, migration or social status, presumed racial, ethnic, national, or social origins and identities, gender or sexuality, housing status, and/or the intersection of these and other factors.

European Union law allows for this reality in part because it exempts minor offenses from directives guaranteeing fundamental procedural protections for individuals in criminal cases. The directives provide for a right to interpretation and translation, a right to information, access to a lawyer and legal aid, the presumption of innocence, and safeguards for children. Relying on arguments of efficiency, countries across Europe are doing away with even the barest of procedural protections to punish people experiencing poverty or who are otherwise marginalized.

European law needs to close gaps in procedural protections. That’s why we are calling on the EU to extend the procedural rights directives to so-called “minor” cases.

Campaign Statement

Our Coalition