Full Statement Here

Introduction

Together, we—(RE)Claim and MCDS, Justice Collective (as part of the Coalition to Abolish Debtor’s Prisons), and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee—submit this joint account of the criminalization of poverty and homelessness in France, Germany, and Hungary. Our groups came together for this submission to show a Europe-wide problem of the mass-fining of disproportionately poor—and, importantly, racialized—groups. We thank you for the opportunity to provide input on these important issues.

While the criminalization of poverty through fines takes on different forms in each of our country contexts, we face a common and structural problem across Europe. Criminalization and fines are imposed in discriminatory ways against people who are already experiencing poverty, come from racialized groups, are experiencing houselessness – or who find themselves at the intersections of these and other identities or challenges.

In each of our states, people are targeted by criminal policy and enforcement because of their poverty, social status, skin color, presumed ethnic, national or social origins and identities, and/or the intersection of these factors. This criminalization involves direct discrimination via offenses that explicitly criminalize behaviors linked to poverty and homelessness or indirect discrimination via more general offenses (such as public order offenses) that are disproportionately applied against these groups because of who they are or are presumed to be, where they live and work, activities they turn to because of poverty, and for additional reasons.

In each of our countries, we see the problem worsening in some meaningful ways, facilitated by the Europe-wide trend towards ever-faster and simplified legal procedures, which in some cases vest adjudicative authority in police rather than courts. As police (and technology) are used to sanction more people, states do away with even the barest of procedural protections—speeding up the punishment of the poor, and allowing for criminalization to proceed at a large scale, without consideration of the underlying facts or inequities.

These problems are structural, engaging laws, policies, practices and deeply held beliefs and cultures in our countries. They involve using tools of punishment to criminalize minority groups and poor people, rather than solve complex economic and social problems or for cynical political gain. Criminalization often serves as an easy out for those responsible: the state can show it is “tough on crime”, “tough on migration”, or that our unequal economic system is the fault of people who don’t have enough. For the people criminalized, however, the outcomes are serious and include fines they cannot pay and prison, as well as significant knock-on effects in all spheres of life.

In this introduction, we highlight three common themes, and in each of our submissions we share the details of our specific contexts, answering key questions asked by the Special Rapporteurs for this call. We hope that our joint submission, which includes geographically diverse European states, shows the connections between these problems across Europe, shedding light on both the similarities and on the different legal and policy frameworks that ultimately lead to these related injustices.

First, we highlight how mass fining disproportionately impacts people from racialized and migrantized groups. This is a consequence of policing practices across Europe, which, as activists and others have shown consistently over the last decades, include racial profiling and other tools that mean that policing, surveillance, and enforcement are concentrated against racialized groups. Because people from racialized groups are disproportionately policed, they are also disproportionately ticketed, fined, and criminalized. In Germany, in part because of racial profiling and the designation and increased policing of so-called crime “hotspots”, over one-third of fines are against non-German citizens.¹ In France, the practice of repeatedly fining young men and youth for public order and driving-related offenses is targeted in communities labelled “sensitive urban areas”, with a high concentration of low-income people from racialized groups. Importantly, in both contexts, we observe that these policies and practices are implemented to remove certain groups from public spaces as part of a pattern of discriminatory harassment. In Germany and France, in some places policing serves the purposes of enabling gentrification, further exacerbating houselessness, poverty, and displacement.

In Hungary the practice of ethnic profiling and the recurring, discriminatory imposition of fines on Roma and the derogatory manifestations of biased police attitudes contribute to a lack of trust by Roma in the police and the criminal legal system. According to the experiences of the Working Group on Petty Offenses in Hungary, it is not a unique phenomenon in poor towns and districts inhabited primarily by Roma that the police use petty offense fining as a tool to intimidate local residents. Though practices vary by place, it is common for law enforcement to appear in areas inhabited by Roma multiple times per day and impose fines for petty offenses related to bicycle or pedestrian traffic. Fining and criminalization are a part of problematic, racially discriminatory policing practices across Europe that include discriminatory identity checks, stop and search, verbal and physical abuse, illegal police detention, and surveillance.

Second, our accounts show how people are criminalized for their poverty and houselessness under various charges or offenses, both criminal and non-criminal. People are criminalized for offenses that target activities associated with being homeless (such as squatting or begging in Hungary). They may also be fined for offenses directly connected to their poverty, such as the criminalization of riding the train without a ticket or petty theft in Germany: Because of years of a shrinking social benefits system, coupled with inflation, people simply cannot afford life’s basic necessities. Third, people without resources are criminalized because of who they are or where they live, as is the case with the criminalization of migration status in Germany, or the ticketing of young men and youth in France for quality-of-life offenses simply because they happen to be in certain places. Finally, people may be criminalized for poverty when they are targeted for enforcement of offenses connected to the consequences of their poverty, as is often the case when people are criminalized for drug-related offenses (discussed in the Germany section). While each of our submissions focuses on specific fact patterns, the other patterns may also be present in our states, and all of these scenarios, whether criminal fines or not—should be understood as the criminalization of poverty.

Finally, in all three places, we see how a move towards “fast-tracked” proceedings and other procedural shortcuts means that people are sentenced quickly, allowing the state to mass criminalize without meeting the burden of actually proving cases and protecting people’s rights. This is a trend that must urgently be reversed. In the case of France, people have almost no ability to contest the fines against them.

The consequences are serious, including prison, insurmountable debts, and immigration consequences. Importantly, research and experience also shows that the impacts accrue not only to the individual, but rather extend to families and entire communities, as people come together to support their loved ones facing criminalization. Even if they are not jailed, people simply cannot pay, and have impossible choices between paying fines or for housing or food, with serious implications on employment, housing, education and other key spheres of life.

The reason we point to a structural, Europe-wide problem is to show that states must be pushed towards bolder and structural changes —because the problems are entrenched-—and not limited to small tweaks in criminal procedure (though we point to the serious shortcomings of these procedures). The European Union framework applies across our countries and needs to be applied in a manner that counters these trends and protects individuals’ rights and freedoms. We urge the Special Rapporteurs to make the following recommendations:

• States should put in place the full range of measures necessary to end discriminatory and abusive fining practices and other discriminatory policing practices, including racial profiling, and discriminatory harassment at the intersection of racial, social and territorial discrimination.
• States should refrain from the criminalization and/or discriminatory enforcement of many of the offenses we discuss in this submission, abolishing offenses that criminalize poverty, houselessness, immigration status, other statuses—or the consequences of these statuses.
• States should immediately abolish debtor’s prisons.
• States should invest resources to address underlying inequities. For example, in Germany, a movement is underway to demand free or affordable public transportation. This is a humane, ecological alternative to criminalizing riding public transportation without a ticket. The state should be urged to invest in this alternative.
• In both criminal and non-criminal offenses, states must provide due process guarantees that, at a bare minimum, meet the common European framework that applies to higher level offenses. While the EU requires due process, counsel, language access, and other basic protections for higher level cases, to date, this framework has not been extended to lower level cases, despite the life-changing ramifications of these cases. We encourage the Rapporteurs to recommend that the European Union remove such exceptions to procedural rights given the significant consequences of these fining practices.
• States should provide amnesty to people currently suffering under fine debts because of the practices outlined in this submission.
• The Rapporteurs should be definitive in their findings, and therefore send a clear message to our states that they cannot wait to solve these problems until they have additional data: The evidence is clear. In each of our states, in particular on issues of racism, the state does not allow for data collection, and then denies the problem exists because of a data gap.
• States should collect and make public anonymized data about fines broken down by indicators that facilitate statistical analysis of implementation to identify disproportionate, discriminatory, or abusive application against particular groups or segments of the population.

We now turn to the details of these practices in France, Germany, and Hungary in our following blog posts.