FRA's Fundamental Rights Survey

• Author: European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (EU body or agency)
• Pages: 5-9

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FRA’s Fundamental Rights Survey collected data from 35,000 people about

their experiences, perceptions and opinions on arange of issues that are

variously encompassed by human rights– including awareness of rights, crime

victimisation, discrimination and equality of treatment, and data protection

and privacy.

This is the f‌irst report based on asmall selection of questions from the

survey. It focuses on selected f‌indings with respect to respondents’ opinions

about human rights (or ‘fundamental rights’ as they are referred to in the

internal context of the EU), their views and perceptions on the functioning

of democratic societies– as apillar on which human rights can f‌lourish, and

on their thoughts on and engagement with public services that have aduty

to enforce human rights law and to protect people’s rights.

FRA will publish further results from the survey

in 2020–2021, both in report format as well as

through an interactive online data explorer. The

data explorer– which will be launched on FRA’s

website at the end of 2020 and will include results

presented in this report– offers the opportunity

to browse results by question, country by country,

and disaggregated by key socio-demographic

characteristics, such as gender, age, and

education. Selected results from the survey will

also be communicated on other occasions to feed

into policy debates at the EU and national level.

FRA will also make the anonymised survey data

set (microdata) available for organisations and

researchers who are interested in carrying out

further analysis of the results after publication

of the survey’s relevant reports.

The Fundamental Rights Survey is the f‌irst

survey FRA has carried out on the general

population of the EU with respect to how they

understand and experience fundamental rights,

and on their interaction with public authorities

that have aduty to protect them. The agency has

undertaken only one other general population

survey, which collected EU comparable data

on the specif‌ic area of women’s experiences

of violence. To date, FRA’s survey research has

concentrated on specif‌ic groups in society that

are particularly vulnerable to rights abuses, and

for which there are limited data. These include ethnic minority and immigrant

groups, the Roma, the EU’s Jewish population, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans

and intersex (LGBTI) people.

FRA’s Fundamental Rights Survey

‘Fundamental rights’ is the term used

for ‘human rights’ in the internal

context of the EU. In the survey

questionnaire, some questions used

the term ‘human rights’ because

this was found to be more readily

understandable by members of

the public who responded to the

questionnaire. Hence, this report

uses the two terms interchangeably.

Note on

terminology