Malcic said that it was difficult to give a well-substantiated assessment of the level and incidence of discrimination in the country since the law went into force only a year ago.
He said that the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman had received 172 discrimination claims, and 130 of them had been resolved. Of those 130 complaints, 98 were rejected as groundless and the Office acted on 32 claims which had a footing in the law on the prevention of discrimination.
Three quarters of the claims were filed by individuals (62 percent of them were men), and only nine claims were lodged through a lawyer.
Most of those complaints (71) referred to the state administration, 40 were about discrimination reportedly committed by legal entities, 18 were about discrimination in judicial agencies, and 10 were about bodies of local self-government.
One third of those complaints (32 percent) were about discrimination in employment and at workplace.
Broken down by the grounds of discrimination, over 30 percent of complaints were about discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity. They were followed by discrimination on the grounds of social status, means test and citizenship.
The ombudsman said that some social groups were more exposed to discrimination and social exclusion risks. This mainly applied to members of the Serb and Roma minorities, returnees and people with insufficient means.
The state secretary at the ministry for family and war veterans' affairs and inter-generational solidarity, Stjepan Adanic, dismissed Malcic's criticism about discrimination against Serbs and Roma in the settlement of issues regarding their social status.
Adanic said that it was not true that 7,000 claims for property restitution filed by returnees were waiting to be resolved. According to Adanic, there are 500 claims of this kind and they will have been settled by the end of this year.
When it comes to the reconstruction of houses damaged in the war, the statistics were not collected along the line of ethnicity and the right to reconstruction was not based on that criterion, the official said.
Adanic said that additional deadlines were given to people who had failed to regulate their citizenship in Croatia in 1991.
Presenting the report, Malcic also urged the authorities to ensure additional financial aid for his office in order to render it more efficient.
The parliamentary caucuses supported Malcic's report.