The 2026 Anti-Racism Conference
Anti-Racism Strategy 2026-2030
Conference | March 2026
On 17 March 2026, Brussels hosted the EU Anti-Racism Conference, formally launching the EU’s first Anti-Racism Strategy 2026–2030 prepared by the European Commission— timed deliberately on the eve of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The strategy positions structural racism as a central barrier to equal opportunities and social cohesion across the Union.
The strategy lands at a difficult moment. The growing influence of far-right parties across Europe has normalised discriminatory attitudes and eroded the political space needed to implement exactly this kind of framework. Commissioner for Equal Rights Hadya Lahbib acknowledged as much in her opening remarks: racism, she argued, does not announce itself — it moves quietly through institutions, hiring processes, housing markets, healthcare and education. True. But it is also a diagnosis the EU has been repeating for years. The question the conference only partially answered is what makes this strategy different.
The first plenary brought together voices from the UN Working Group for People of African Descent, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) and the European Network against Racism (ENAR) to address structural racism’s defining challenge: it is hard to see, harder to measure, and hardest to dismantle. The consensus was clear — systematic data collection is not optional, it is the precondition for any serious intervention.
The second panel moved to implementation, examining how international frameworks translate — or fail to translate — into national action. The examples of Malta and Canada were cited as models of what political will combined with genuine local engagement can produce. It is a promising premise, though the conference offered more description of these cases than interrogation of them.
Both sessions featured strong speakers with relevant expertise. What they lacked was friction. The Q&A format, with questions selected in advance, kept exchanges smooth but predictable. In a conference explicitly about structural exclusion, the decision to manage public participation so tightly felt like a missed opportunity — and, arguably, a small contradiction.
The breakout session on the external dimension of racism and its intersection with migration was in many ways the most substantive of the day. Speakers from PICUM, OHCHR, Hope for Children and the European External Action Service mapped the gap between the EU’s stated human rights commitments and its actual migration governance — a gap that remains considerable. The session identified clear priorities: safeguards against racial bias in border and asylum procedures, stronger coherence between external and internal EU policy, and recommendations that go beyond principle to accountability.
Yet for a session about how migrants experience racism, the panel was composed entirely of institutional and organisational representatives. No one with direct lived experience spoke. This is not a minor oversight — it reflects a broader pattern the conference itself was ostensibly convening to challenge. If structural racism is, as Commissioner Lahbib said, about who gets to speak and who gets sidelined, then the composition of these panels is itself a data point.
The EU Anti-Racism Strategy 2026–2030 is a serious document, and the conference that launched it gathered the right institutions around the right questions. What remains open — as it has after previous strategies — is the distance between framework and implementation, between representation on paper and representation in the room. Closing that distance is not a technical problem. It is a political one.