Is it right to ask university and job applicants their ethnic origin?

EU 10683 Mod. Brit. Society Ethnic Origin

metropolitan area between 1968 and 1982 were born in foreign countries [and] [t]he annual mortality rate of Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s disease in this group of foreign-born cases […] was twice that of French-born residents […]” (Cathala). An experiment in the State of New York, USA, in the late eighties showed that “[w]hite children in [a] lower socioeconomic area had the most unfavorable risk factor profile” (Walter) regarding coronary heart diseases and compared to an assimilable group of black children. And in the end, “[p]remenopausal black women have a 2- to 3-fold greater rate of coronary heart disease (CHD) than premenopausal white women” (Gerard). It is therefore useful for the doctor to know of what ethnic origin his patient is.

Even though there are some critics of the denomination ‘race’ to label an ethnic group – meaning that “race is a cultural idea, not a biological one” (Wade) – one cannot ignore the differences between people of different origin. And, be it a socio-cultural or a biological name, whenever there were visible differences between two groups, history has shown that the less potential or less powerful one would be at least discriminated against by the other one. That is why “[i]n 1992, the General Assembly [of the United Nations] adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities” (United Nations). In our modern society it has become unusual for a state to be a mono-ethnic state, meaning a state “where a distinct national group corresponds to a territorial unit” (United Nations). It is therefore necessary for the government of the particular state to help to protect their ethnic minorities and make their culture be a part of the whole nation’s culture. The twentieth century, regrettably, ethnic conflicts appeared frequently on the agenda: East Timor, Burundi, Croatia. In the case of the Roma a solution is still out of reach because they still suffer from discrimination in large fields of many societies, in particular in Eastern Europe and North Africa. As ignorance towards the fate of Roma has been, and still is, a part of the cultural tradition in many countries, “discrimination against the Roma was often seen as natural or normal” (United Nations). This is just an example, but to avoid this kind of discrimination governments have a number of possibilities acording to the United Nations’ Charta:

Other positives action taken by States include: legislative measures that introduce higher maximum penalties for racially motivated crimes; the use of ethnic monitoring to ascertain the number of persons of particular ethnic and national origin in various kinds of employment and the setting of targets to increase the employment of persons of minority origins in fields where they were under- represented; the establishment of new advisory bodies on matters relevant to

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