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Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism


The Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR), also referred to as Centre for Equal Opportunities and Fight against Racism (CEOFR) or translated as Centre for Equal Opportunities and Struggle against Racism (Dutch: Unia (Interfederaal Gelijkekansencentrum) (), before: Centrum voor gelijkheid van kansen en voor racismebestrijding or CGKR, French: Centre pour l'égalité des chances et la lutte contre le racisme or CECLR) is a Belgian government agency under the responsibility of the Prime Minister of Belgium. Its director is Jozef De Witte ().

The Centre was founded in 1993 by an Act of the Belgian Chamber of People's Representatives.

The Centre lists as its principal tasks:

The CEOOR has as its main goal to aid victims of discrimination, after an act of discrimination has occurred, or to prevent such acts.

It has four ways of achieving this goal :

The CEOOR was, together with the Liga voor Mensenrechten (Human Rights League), a plaintiff in the law case that led to the conviction of three Vlaams Blok organisations for "incitement to hate and discrimination."

In April 2002 the Centre lodged a complaint against the Centre Islamique et Culturel de Belgique because of a video on its website in which Israel was equated with a Nazi dictatorship. In June 2002, the CEOOR lodged another complaint against the Belgian Arab European League, also for racism.

The Centre has been criticized by, among others, Matthias Storme. Storme sees the Centre as leading a "political inquisition" in suppressing alternative political views. Storme was earlier successful in fighting a case before the Belgian Supreme Court, where he showed that some articles of the Belgian anti-discrimination law were in violation with the constitutionally protected right of freedom of speech. However, Storme himself was named in 2014 as administrator of this Interfederal Centre. Another publisher at The Brussels Journal, Paul Beliën, withdrew a text upon the Centre's officially filed complaint.


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