The Turkish Foreign Ministry has created a database to speed up the fight against racism and xenophobia and it will especially pay attention to cases that affect Turkish citizens living abroad.
Emphasizing the importance of taking on a leading role in making decisions and recommendations in issues, such as xenophobia, discrimination and racism, the ministry announced that it will solve the problems of its six million citizens that live abroad more quickly with its newly established database.
Additionally, the ministry said that it is taking necessary initiatives on the international platform by holding statistics of xenophobia, discrimination and racism. On every platform, the ministry has emphasized that the view migrants are main cause of all evils in Europe should be corrected, underlining that European laws and policies contributing to this view should be changed.
Moreover, citizens who have been attacked abroad will be able to take necessary initiatives at local authorities by contacting the Foreign Representatives or by reaching the Consular Call Center 24/7 and will benefit from the necessary legal counseling services free of charge.
The annual European Islamophobia Report (EIR) revealed earlier in 2017 that Islamophobia is becoming a real threat to the foundations of democratic order and the values of the EU, social peace and peaceful coexistence across Europe. The findings of the report clearly show that the level of Islamophobia in the fields of education, employment, the media, politics, the justice system and the internet is on the rise.
Furthermore, a recent Turkish parliamentary report prepared by the Parliamentary Research Services found out that hate crimes committed by far-right people increased by 2,6 percent in Germany to 23,555 cases.
In addition, throughout 2016, a large number of violent attacks targeting mosques, refugee centers and establishments owned by Turkish-origin citizens were widely reported in the media, particularly in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Austria. While anti-Muslim attacks and xenophobia are on the rise across the continent, Austrian authorities pressed charges in about 1,690 cases related to right-wing extremism in 2015, the highest number to date in a single year, and up from 1,200 in 2014, a report by Austria's domestic intelligence service BVT showed.
Delivering a speech in Baku, Azerbaijan, Çavuşoğlu said last Thursday, "Europe's biggest problems now are racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. We need to demonstrate our strong stance against this. It is our duty to warn politicians that lose their ground."
Meanwhile, Turkey's EU Minister Ömer Çelik said European countries should fight against the mentality of "racists," especially on migration from Africa. Çelik suggested EU counties only regarded the African continent as a kind of detention camp, and said they were focused solely on preventing immigration.
