The Commissioner for the Protection of Equality, Milan Antonijević, stayed in Tallinn, where he discussed with colleagues from Estonian independent institutions the challenges in the process of advancing equality, standards in combating discrimination, experiences in the field of European integration and human rights, as well as problems common to EU countries and candidate states.

The meeting with the Chancellor of Justice of Estonia, an institution that will soon celebrate ninety years of existence, as well as with representatives of the National Preventive Mechanism on issues of torture prevention and human rights protection, was an opportunity to discuss general practices in the protection of human rights. Discussions were also held on specific cases and on achieving equal conditions for Serbian citizens serving sentences in Estonia who were convicted by the Hague Tribunal. “We are grateful for the attention that Estonia’s National Preventive Mechanism pays to these issues, and especially to Serbian citizens,” Antonijević emphasized.

An important part of the two-day working visit to Estonia was also the meeting with representatives of Estonian civil society, as well as the Human Rights Centre and other significant organizations with decades of experience. Antonijević also had an open and substantive discussion on standards in the field of equality protection, as well as on legislative initiatives and possibilities for institutional cooperation, with Christian Veske, the Gender Equality and Equal Treatment Commissioner of Estonia, emphasizing the cooperation that the two institutions have within the framework of the European Network of Equality Bodies, Equinet.