This item was published during the term of a previous administration that ended in April 2007
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Race Equality Annual Report
01/03/2004
The Executive today published its first Race Equality
Annual Report.
It highlights achievements to date and planned future
action to promote race equality and eliminate unlawful
discrimination across the work of the Executive and its
agencies.
As well as looking at each of the Executive's key
commitments and providing examples of best practice, the
Report gives overviews of activity in each of the Executive
Departments, and the agencies covered by the scheme.
Permanent Secretary John Elvidge said:
"This Report demonstrates our continued commitment to
promoting race equality and tackling racism in Scotland.
The report highlights progress in key areas, such as health
and within the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal
Service.
"Over the last year key pieces of work have been
undertaken to support departments across the Executive in
their work on race equality, including an analysis of the
ethnicity data from the 2001 census, and the launch of our
Mainstreaming Equality Web Site.
"The Scottish Executive is determined to become a
modern, dynamic and inclusive employer and the publishing
of this annual report is another small step
towards achieving that objective".
The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 (RR(A)A) places
a general statutory duty on public authorities to eliminate
unlawful racial discrimination, promote equality of
opportunity and good race relations between persons of
different racial groups. To ensure the better performance
of the general duty, Scottish Ministers used their powers
to require key bodies, including the Executive, to publish
a Race Equality Scheme setting out how they intend to meet
their legal requirements.
In December 2003 the Mainstreaming Equality Web Site was
launched. It
collates equality related web-based resources,
designed to help policy makers and researchers understand
the broad range of equality issues that have relevancy
across policy areas.