6.6.2024

Fundamental Rights Report 2024

The European Union Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) has published its annual report on the protection of fundamental rights in the EU Member States. The Fundamental Rights Report 2024 focuses on the most pressing fundamental rights issues in Europe in 2023, including poverty, threats to democracy and fundamental rights concerns at the EU’s external borders.

According to the report, rising energy and living costs in 2023 have pushed people into poverty. This concerns particularly children and single-parent, Roma and migrant families. Excessive state interventions against the rights to freedom of association, assembly and expression restrict space for civil society and human rights defenders. Tensions between national legislation regulating access to asylum and EU law continue, along with the allegations of fundamental rights violations and ill treatment at borders. The report also pays attention to growing intolerance across Europe against groups, such as Jews, Muslims, people of African descent, Roma, and migrants.

To address these challenges, the report underlines the need to ensure a strong and sustainable fundamental rights protection across the EU, particularly for people in vulnerable situations. EU countries should ensure that the responses to the cost-of-living crisis reach disadvantaged groups. They should take action to monitor and record any restrictions to civic space and to counter all forms of racism and related intolerance. Fundamental rights safeguards at external land and sea borders should be strengthened. The report also suggests how policymakers and civil society can work in tandem to counter the threat of social exclusion and enable a more equal and fairer society for all.

The Fundamental Rights Report 2024 is based on the results of FRA’s own primary quantitative and qualitative research and on secondary desk research at the national level conducted by FRA’s multidisciplinary research network, FRANET. The Institute for Human Rights at Åbo Akademi University, together with the Faculty of Law at the University of Turku, currently form the national focal point of FRANET in Finland. The Finnish country report is also available on-line on the FRA website.