The owner of a car wash in the center of Riga, the capital of Latvia, will have to pay 1,000 euros in moral damages to a Ukrainian citizen for discrimination, the Riga city court has decided.
The owner of the car wash did not plead guilty, but the court found that the owner of the car wash violated the ban on discrimination in providing the service due to the nationality of the female customer, the Latvian Center for Human Rights reported. The owner of the car wash and its exact location were not specified, lsm.lv reports.
The plaintiff in court was a Ukrainian citizen who had sought asylum from the war and traveled from Ukraine in his personal vehicle to Latvia in March 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Wanting to wash and clean the car after a long journey lasting five days, the plaintiff came with his daughter to a car wash in the center of Riga. Although the car wash employees initially told the customer to wait, then, when they noticed that the plaintiff’s car had Ukrainian license plates, they refused to provide service, claiming that the owner of the car wash prohibited them from serving Ukrainians,” the center’s statement read.
The woman initially left the car wash, but shocked by what had happened, she returned to find out if she had really understood correctly that she had not been served just because she was Ukrainian, and to receive an apology. However, the woman was again refused service and one of her employees even told her: “Change the license plates and we will wash them.” The plaintiff has an audio recording of this conversation.
Since the laundry worker did not apologize, the woman called the police for such discriminatory treatment. According to the Center for Human Rights, the police carried out an inspection and received written explanations from the car wash employees, who confirmed that they had acted according to the management’s order. The woman also reported a specific case of discrimination to the Latvian Center for Human Rights, which provides legal assistance in cases of discrimination.
“In providing explanations to the court, the defendant did not admit the request. He denied that he had ordered not to carry out any inspections of the cars with Ukrainian license plates. The defendant claimed that he had ordered the cars with Ukrainian license plates not to be inspected free of charge and out of order, not to be serviced at all. However, the defendant has not indicated the existence of evidence to support these claims,” the human rights center explained.
The court, after listening to the explanations of the participants in the trial, listening to the testimony of witnesses, examining and evaluating the evidence of the case, recognized that the defendant directly violated the prohibition on discrimination provided by law by not providing services to the plaintiff due to of his ethnicity.
The Court referred to Article 91 of the Constitution, which states: “All people are equal before the law and the courts in Latvia. Human rights shall be exercised without any discrimination”, as well as Article 21 of the Charter of human rights of the European Union, which states that any discrimination is unacceptable.
The court also took into account the fact that the defendant neither expressed remorse nor apologized for the incident.
The sentence was announced on November 28, 2023 and is still subject to appeal.
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2023-12-05 17:31:31
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