The European Commission Coordinator on combating anti-Muslim hatred, David Friggieri, took this 3rd roundtable as an opportunity to join forces with OSCE/ODHIR. ODIHR's Adviser on Combating Intolerance and Discrimination against Muslims, Ďermana Seta, co-chaired the extended roundtable which brought together a wider variety of NGOs working on anti-Muslim hatred and discrimination.

David Friggieri presented the main activities developed since the 2nd roundtable held last December: 1) Securing NGOs' input on the issue of ethnic profiling and discriminatory attitudes by the police, 2) His first country visits (in Malta, Germany and Austria with visits scheduled in Sweden and France), where he held talks with Muslim communities, religious organisations, NGOs and national authorities; 3) His participation in the first High-Level Forum on Combating Anti-Muslim Discrimination and Hatred at the United Nations (co-sponsored by the EU, the United States, Canada and the OIC) in January 2017; 4) The organisation of a Joint Day of Action against Antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred and discrimination together with OSCE-ODIHR, ARDI and the EEAS in May 2017.  

Ďermana Seta introduced her work on combating religious intolerance, namely: 1) the development of reporting mechanisms developed by OSCE states and NGOs to provide comparative hate crime data; 2) teaching materials being developed to deal with intolerance against Muslims, to be implemented in collaboration with Ministries of Education in OSCE states; 3) the elaboration of training material for police forces and prosecutors to tackle bias motivation, hate crimes and anti-Muslim hatred.

The NGOs present raised concerns about the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in European societies, fuelled by political rhetoric in a number of electoral campaigns. They called for an increased recognition of this phenomenon, clear condemnation of it and for greater NGO access to national authorities. With regard to the despicable terrorist attacks on European soil, NGOs recalled that the authorities have a role to play in clearly condemning both the attacks themselves as well hate crime against Muslims.