Acknowledgement

I am grateful to a number of people who helped and assisted me with my work on this master thesis. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. Dr. Johan Leman for handing racism and intolerance as the issue of my thesis. He supported me to work on the country-by-country approach of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (Council of Europe) when, at the beginning of February, it had become clear that it was impossible to gain a new insight into the activities of the Consultative Commission on Racism and Xenophobia (European Union) because of the limited access to the primary sources of this organisation.

I would especially like to thank my supervisor for the instructive and captivating discussions I had with him, as well as for the interests I gained trough him, both from an academic and personal point of view.

I am also thankful to my second reader, Prof. Dr. Marc Hooghe, for being so kind as to critically peruse the theoretical part of my thesis and, Mr. François Sant’Angelo for explaining the procedure of ECRI’s country-by-country reports with so much sympathy.

I extend a special word of thanks to my parents who strongly supported me to spend an extra year on the school desks in order to let me into the secrets of Europe. I likewise thank them for offering me full scope to develop my talents.

I want to thank my brother Alex who volunteered for proofreading my thesis with so much enthusiasm that I started wondering whether he was the expert on this topic or I. I thank my sister Katrien, if only because of the fact that she was working on her final thesis as well during this year and that not even one word was needed to understand and encourage each other in this regard.

Finally I would like to give special thanks to my boyfriend Raf for his never ceasing faith in me, his sincere love and the excellent dinners he prepared while, under the pretext of this thesis, I was gaining more in – depth knowledge about racism and intolerance in Europe.