E/CN.4/1996/72/Add.4 page 6 17. The United Kingdom was in fact one of the first Member States of the United Nations to make a frontal attack on the problems that may arise from race relations, by very early on adopting laws on the subject and creating a Commission for Racial Equality responsible for supervising their implementation. 18. Remarkable progress has been achieved during the 30 years of the policy of racial equality, but increasingly subtle forms of discrimination have emerged. Moreover, in recent years, the economic crisis and competition for increasingly scarce resources and jobs, as well as political activity by far right and neo-Nazi movements and parties and violent action by the police against certain communities, have polarized social relations between rich and poor on the one hand, and between Whites and Blacks on the other. In these black communities, race riots, racially-motivated murders and various incidents of greater or lesser seriousness have occurred. 19. The arrival of immigrants and asylum-seekers, in particular from the southern hemisphere, has accentuated the ambient xenophobia. 20. The recent measures envisaged by the Government to check immigration and requests for asylum do not seem likely to relieve tensions. 21. The Special Rapporteur proposes to consider some of the problems faced by British society and then to describe the measures taken by Her Majesty's Government and actions initiated by civil society. B. Prejudices, stereotypes and racism in daily life 22. As the Human Rights Committee has been informed in the past, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and Asians driving luxury cars are unjustifiably stopped and searched by the police. The police are alleged to harbour prejudices against the majority of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans whom they regard as drug dealers or pimps or, in any case, criminals. When stopped, supposedly for a vehicle registration check, such persons may also be questioned regarding their residence status because they are automatically suspected of being in Britain illegally. Young Asians are sometimes suspected of having stolen the cars they are driving. 23. An African name can be an almost insurmountable obstacle to obtaining a skilled job. Many Africans are unable to obtain interviews because their applications are rejected by employers, even if they have attended the best British universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, or the London School of Economics. An Afro-Caribbean or African with a first and family name of British origin may be invited to an interview which, in rare cases, may lead to an offer of employment, but an African who has retained the signs of his identity will arouse negative prejudices and be stereotyped as failing to integrate into society, having bizarre customs and dress or being incompetent, which will prevent him from leaping this first hurdle and obtaining a management position in a firm. 24. A Muslim name may also be equated with failure to integrate into British society. Generally speaking, the middle and upper classes have a particularly strong resentment of Muslims, an “Islamophobia”, especially with regard to