“Unbearable to hear” and “difficult to prove”, denounces a lawyer

Discrimination in housing reported in a new survey by SOS Racisme is something‘”unbearable to hear” and “difficult to prove”, denounces Monday, March 21 on franceinfo Jérôme Delas, lawyer, member of the ELUCID network, support and information network for victims of discrimination, set up by the town hall of Bordeaux. “Discrimination in housing, clearly, continues”, he regrets. SOS Racisme shows that 8.5% of the 136 real estate agencies which were tested by the association agreed to comply with the discriminatory demands of the owners whose accommodation they manage.

franceinfo: What do you think of this new survey carried out by SOS Racisme?

These results do not surprise me at all. Housing discrimination clearly continues. It is a discrimination which is humanly intolerable and which is totally illegal. All the same, there are still 48 to 49% of agencies that are unable to effectively fight against prejudice. We have heard agency managers or donors who consider that a family of immigrant origin or presupposed as such would be a large family, would be a family that would be noisy, that would be a family with insufficient levels of resources. And all that is unbearable to hear.

Is it still difficult to prove?

It remains difficult to prove because in the end, the agencies operate in a very sneaky way. The stages of discrimination can be different. There can be discrimination in the supply of housing. One can have discrimination in the constitution of files and finally in the examination of the candidatures. These different steps still allow real estate agencies to put a brake on free access to housing. This is the first point. We manage to progress thanks to the testing operations which are now legally authorized since the 2006 law on equal opportunities. We can salute the work of associations such as SOS Racisme itself, which allow us to move forward in a very concrete way.

What are the remedies?

Concretely, it is the filing of a criminal complaint with criminal sanctions which can be imposed by the criminal court with three years’ imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros. It is also civil actions which are a little longer, a little more uncertain because the judicial process remains quite long, which make it possible to obtain damages. But we must also be aware that the upstream work is all the more fundamental since a person who is going to be discriminated against in his access to housing may be totally overwhelmed and will have energy to devote elsewhere and in this case in the looking for a new home rather than going to legal action.