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The Monkey That Does Not See
(Last modified: 2004-08-19 08:38:51)
Between the right to the protection of sensitive data, such as one’s ethnic origin, the right not to be discriminated against, and the right of ethnic minorities to the use of their language, culture and to political representation, every democratic state needs to strike a fair balance. The balance in today’s Hungary, it is submitted, is far from being fair, and as such is not acceptable. If equality is to mean that equals are treated equally, whereas un-equals are treated unequally, then it is imperative to know who needs equal treatment and who needs unequal treatment. To know a person for who he is, we need to see him as such in practice and in law alike. Our task may be hampered by having visible as opposed to non-visible minorities. |
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Housing Rights Litigation
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:05:25)
Housing remains an issue of major importance to Roma: for example, grossly inadequate standard of housing, hazardous living conditions, segregated settlements, forced evictions. Protection of housing rights by the State is guaranteed by a number of international legally binding norms. The UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights safeguards “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions”. The UN International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination emphasises that “State parties undertake to prohibit and eliminate racial discrimination…in the enjoyment of …right to housing”. The European Convention on Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence”. The detailed standards by which States should implement these legally-binding instruments are contained within General Comments No. 4 and 7 for the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; General Recommendation No. 27 for the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination; and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, to name only three such bodies of elaboration. Although there are clear international law standards on housing rights with legally binding obligations and duties on States (and in many countries some housing rights are regulated by domestic legislation), the extent to which national Courts accept domestic and international jurisprudence in the field of housing rights varies considerably from country to country. |
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Court Action Against Segregated Education in Bulgaria: A Legal Effort to Win Roma Access to Equality
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:26:25)
Margarita Ilieva and Daniela Mihaylova
In Central and Eastern Europe today, segregated education is the largest obstacle for Roma in their access to fundamental rights. In itself, segregated education represents illegal discrimination. Inherently unjust, its impact on human dignity and identity is destructive. Its devastating effects on rights enjoyment and participation are overarching. The stamp of segregated education put on young individuals at the very threshold of their initiation as members of society engraves upon their tender identities inequality, marginality and isolation. With time, this corrosive imprint, etched ever deeper at each point of passage through social life, ever more painfully reiterated by each oppressive contact with the dominant mainstream society, becomes the powerful formant of a socially dysfunctional mentality of inferiority and isolation, tightly locking the potential of individuals to own and express themselves, and to participate. This crippling mentality operates to disadvantage entire communities, limiting their present and conditioning their future. In Bulgaria, as in much of the rest of Europe, it has long been grinding down the Roma. |
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The Bulgarian Draft Anti-Discrimination Law: An Opportunity to Make Good on the Constitutional Promise of Equality in a Post-Communist Society
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:28:43)
Margarita Ilieva
In Bulgaria, the Constitution broadly declares discrimination inadmissible but no statutory provisions implement this constitutional principle. No comprehensive anti-discrimination law exists. Existing anti-discrimination law is limited to a number of abstract bans on discrimination reiterating the constitutional declaration. These general clauses prohibiting discrimination on various grounds are scattered under a number of laws, their terminology, protected grounds and scope non-harmonised, and the level of protection for the various grounds, including race/ethnicity, religion/belief, age, disability and sexual orientation, non-uniform. Existing definitions of discrimination are fragmentary and non-harmonised. No concrete prohibitions on specific discriminatory actions are provided. No justifiability tests are elaborated under legislation, or in case law. |
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Forced Exit: ERRC Legal Action in Italian Expulsion Case
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:28:43)
Esther Farkas
In March 2000, we were in Rome, Italy. At that time we had already lived for ten years in a big camp, on a great field, where we lived in two little houses. On March 3, many police officers came, at 2 o’clock in the morning. There were many policemen, masked and wearing dark glasses. They called out my name. They told me, ‘Come with us to the bus for the police station.’ I wanted to go back to the house to take some diapers for my sick daughter Alisa, but they did not let me. Before the deportation we did not receive any announcement that we would be deported, we did not know anything.” |
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Housing Rights and Forced Evictions in Serbia
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:29:52)
Branimir Pleše
Zoran Radičević, Ćazim Kovačević, Zoran Paunović, Zoran Petrović, Miljan Matić, Zeljko Paunović, Steva Miladinović, Senka Duraković, Zoran Mitrović and Svetislav Stojanović are all Roma and were all, together with their families, as of March 20, 2002, living in an illegal, predominantly R omani settlement close to a hospital on Zvečanska Street, Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro. They have been housed in this settlement for the last 15 years and have in the meantime invested considerable time and their limited financial resources into making their lives bearable. Since moving into the abandoned sheds, they have built separate toilets and a drainage system and even secured power supply. |
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Fighting dirty business: litigating environmental racism
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:33:16)
Barbora Kvočekova
Chester, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., is a small industrial city of roughly 42,000 inhabitants, sixty-five percent of whom are black. The rest of Delaware County, where Chester is located, is ninety-one percent white. By the 1980s, Chester had one of the highest crime rates in the state, the poorest schools in the state, and dramatically lower median incomes than the remainder of the county. Chester also had the highest child mortality rate in Pennsylvania, the lowest birth rate, and among highest death rate due to certain malignant tumours. These conditions led city government officials to adopt policies aimed at encouraging anyone and everyone to bring jobs to Chester. As a result, as of 1999, Chester had one of the highest concentrations of industrial facilities in Pennsylvania and was home to numerous hazardous waste producers and two oil refineries. Moreover, since 1987, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) has issued seven permits for waste facilities within Delaware County, five of which are located in Chester. |
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ERRC amicus curiae brief in U.K. Gypsy housing case
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:33:16)
On May 24, 2000, the European Court of Human Rights heard the cases of Sally Chapman v. UK, Thomas and Jessica Coster v. UK, John and Catherine Beard v. UK, Jane Smith v. UK, and Thomas Lee v. UK, all cases pertaining to the rights of Gypsies in Britain to home, freedom from discrimination in the use of their own land and the right to live according to a traditional way-of-life, as members of an ethnic minority. The ERRC filed an amicus curiae brief in connection with the cases. The ERRC’s interest in the cases is twofold. First, the cases are of great significance to the general position of Roma in the European Convention’s scheme of rights protection, and in particular to the way in which Articles 8 and 14 are interpreted in their application to Roma. Second, the cases raise the question which the OSCE High Commissioner has recently considered in the context of the UK, namely whether such an approach to the provision of sites for nomadic or semi-nomadic Roma is compatible with basic norms of human rights and non-discrimination. Provisions for nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma are salient primarily in western Europe where, in comparison with the former Communist Block, Roma have never been forcibly settled on a programmatic basis. In the UK, however, recent legislative and policy changes — in particular the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act — have increasingly forced Gypsies to choose between assimilation and criminalization. Decisions in the cases are expected in early Autumn 2000. |
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Roma dignity restored in a landmark judgement
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:34:14)
Branimir Pleše
R.J. and his sons R.L. and R.J., together with their families, live in a village in Pest County, Hungary. On 12 August 1997, in a neighbouring village, a local company office had been robbed by a group of armed men. On the night of the incident officers of the Special Metropolitan Police Force surrounded the area where the three men lived. Through a loudspeaker, the police then asked them to come out of their houses. Once they did so, R.J. and R.L. were immediately handcuffed and forced to lay on the ground with their faces down. Finally, the three men, all wearing slippers, shorts and tee shirts, were taken to the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. At the same time, the police apprehended their cousin R.B. in the same manner. He too was scantily dressed — wearing nothing but boxer shorts. R.L. begged the police not to handcuff R.B. in view of his age and his heart condition. The officers ignored this request; moreover, they put a hood on R.B’s head and pulled it down across his face, which prevented him from seeing anything and considerably impeded his breathing. None of the four Romani men resisted the police in any way. Their homes were searched, but nothing incriminating was found. |
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Freedom of Expression: A European View
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:34:14)
Roger Errera
FREEDOM of expression is an essential constitutional right in our societies. It is guaranteed by Article 10 of the ECHR. Nowhere, however, is it an absolute right, as is shown by the present state of international law, for example by Article 10(2) of the Convention, which states:
The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary. As is clear, from the texts of Article 10(2) of the ECHR and Article 4(a) of the CERD, among the necessary limitations on the right to freedom of expression are, in Europe and elsewhere (e.g. Canada), group libel and hate speech laws. |
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Roma and forced migration: lessons of recent Canadian cases
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:35:47)
Arthur C. Helton
From their arrival on the European continent, Roma have faced mistrust, rejection, and exclusion. In 1504, Louis XII forbade Roma from entering France; in 1496, the German parliament declared Roma to be traitors to Christianity; and from the fifteenth century until as late as 1864, Roma lived as slaves in Romania. However, the ultimate act of aggression and violence against Roma came with the Holocaust of the Second World War, in which between 270,000 and 500,000 Roma were murdered. |
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Roma rights litigation
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:35:47)
Dimitrina Petrova
On October 28, 1998, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued its decision on the case of Assenov v. Bulgaria. Anton Assenov, a young Rom who had been forcefully arrested, handcuffed and beaten by police officers in Shoumen, north-eastern Bulgaria, in September 1992, became the first Romani person ever to win his case at an international court of law. Between the autumn of 1992 and the autumn of 1998 lie six years of what I will define here as the formative stages of two interdependent and somewhat overlapping civic 'movements' in post-communist Europe. The first is the 'movement' for legal defence of the rights of the Roma. I realised that this 'movement' would be reality when the Human Rights Project, a Bulgarian organisation developing legal strategies to benefit the Roma, won in 1995 the case of Kiril Yosifov Yordanov, a Rom from Pazardjik, in which the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior was ordered by a domestic court to pay reparation to a victim of a punitive expedition by police. |
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Law and practice in international and domestic courts
(Last modified: 2004-08-18 15:37:08)
James Goldston
This one and one-half day seminar, organised by the European Roma Rights Center and financed by the European Union, offered intensive review and analysis of the standards and caselaw of parts of the European Convention on Human Rights, discussed their applicability in Romanian courts, and presented a range of issues for consideration by human rights litigators before the Strasbourg organs. Approximately twenty lawyers (Roma and non-Roma), one Romani law student, two Romani activists, and one human rights professional participated in the seminar, which focused specifically on the rights of Roma and more generally on universal human rights standards. Discussion addressed the following topics: (i) admissibility requirements for applications to the European Commission on Human Rights; (ü) Strasbourg caselaw under ECHR Articles 6 (access to justice/right to fair trial) and 14 (non-discrimination); (iii) survey of litigation and litigation strategies on behalf of Roma before the Strasbourg organs; and (iv) civil and criminal remedies for human rights violations in Romanian courts. Lawyers were provided with the following Romanian-language documents: summaries of European Court caselaw in each area, lists of relevant decisions, an application form to the European Commission on Human Rights, and guidelines for lawyers in filing applications with the Commission. |
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