In accordance with Article 16 of Council Regulation 1035/97/EC of 2 June 1997 establishing a European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, the Commission hereby presents a progress report on the Centre's activities. The Centre is still in the early stages of implementing its programmes of activities and carrying out its tasks. This is due to the initial problems in the setting up of the Centre. Moreover, setting up the European Racism and Xenophobia Information Network (Raxen), for example, will still require several more months' work.
The Regulation provided that the Commission would present an evaluation report on the centre's activities during the third year following the Regulation's entry into force. The Commission considers that three years is not enough to be able to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of the Centre's activities and that these activities should therefore be assessed over a longer period of time in order to evaluate them properly.
This report will therefore only be an interim report, presenting the activies which the Centre has carried out to date, but without proper evaluation of these activities. The Commission intends to base its evaluation report, which will include proposals to modify or extend the Centre's tasks if appropriate, on an evaluation carried out by external assessors which should start before the end of 2000.�