Roma Rights 1, 2009 Hard Times for Roma: Economics, Politics and Violence
(Last modified: 2009-07-31 12:35:22)
For some time now, extremism has been visible in several European countries. Political parties espousing an explicit anti-immigrant, anti-Romani and/or anti-Semitic agenda are gaining electoral success and support from the public. The June 2009 European Parliament elections exemplified this tendency: In several countries, extremist political parties achieved unprecedented success and now enjoy increased political power.
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Roma Rights 2, 2008
Italy's Bad Example
(Last modified: 2009-03-18 13:25:22)
2008-09 will be remembered by Roma rights and human rights activists for the extremely troublesome situation of Romani communities in Italy. Mounting racism and anti-Romani sentiment erupted in Naples and Milan in May 2008. Moreover, various legal measures and policies adopted by the public authorities, such as the ongoing "census" of the Romani population and the transportation of Roma to special camps even further from city centres in order to "sanitise" urban centres were outright abuses of individual freedoms and rights. Growing fear and hatred of Roma among the general population on the one hand and the hostile approach of the national government and some local administrations on the other created a witch hunt atmosphere directed against even long-established Romani and Sinti Italian citizens as well as newly arriving Romani migrants. |
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Roma Rights 1, 2008
Roma Education: The Promise of D.H.
(Last modified: 2008-11-05 16:50:22)
On 13 November 2007, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights made a landmark decision advancing anti-discrimination jurisprudence in Europe, ruling that the segregation of Romani students in special remedial schools is a form of unlawful discrimination. This momentous decision for Roma across Europe was made in the case D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic (also known as the "Ostrava Case"). |
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Roma Rights 4, 2007:
Child Protection
(Last modified: 2008-04-24 12:11:10)
Child protection is a rapidly developing field in human rights; in the last decades, both the practices and the international legal frameworks have substantially changed and an increasing number of civic initiatives concentrated on this topic became active. With the hope of stimulating an international debate on child protection systems and the position of Roma, this Roma Rights is devoted to the topic of Child Protection.
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Roma Rights 3, 2007:
Perceptions
(Last modified: 2007-11-26 12:11:10)
Stereotypes take on a life of their own once they emerge from Pandoras box. Distorted perceptions are mirrored onto ethnic and racial groups and inflict psychological wounds on individuals that are cast as belonging to those groups. The end result is collective marginalisation or collective oppression. This issue of Roma Rights explores the "perceptions" of Roma which are present in certain fields and societies. Amongst the contributors, Claude Cahn debates the implications of stigma attached to "Gypsyness" within Romani communities with regard to addressing human rights matters in his article, "The Unseen Powers: Perception, Stigma and Roma Rights". Alternatively, in his article "In the Eye of the Beholder: Contemporary Perceptions of Roma in Europe", Larry Olomoofe writes on how Roma are perceived in contemporary European societies. Adrian Marshs "Research and the Many Representations of Romani Identity" narrates the historiography of Romani studies and how Roma are perceived in the academic field. In a case study presented in his article "The Perception of Gypsies in Turkish Society", Suat Kolukirik pursues a historical and sociological viewpoint of how Roma perceived in Turkey. Andras Kadar analyses the way legislation reflects Roma and their specific problems through the looking glass of the Hungarian legal system in his article, "Roma and Law: A Semi-Pessimistic Overview". Finally, Henry Scicluna discusses racist rhetoric related to Roma in his article "Anti-Romani Speech in Europes Public Space: The Mechanism of Hate Speech".
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Roma Rights 1-2, 2007: Social Assistance
(Last modified: 2007-07-03 15:18:08)
This issue of Roma Rights takes a critical look at the current efforts to retool the nature of the welfare state across Europe, and how these efforts affect Europe's Romani population. The welfare state attempts to enact social justice for citizens by mitigating unfairness created by market economies through proactive social assistance schemes. In the past, these have consisted of unemployment benefits, public health care, and other social services. Recent labour market reforms have also introduced "market-friendly" activation policies, which aim to reduce public costs for social assistance by re-integrating the excluded into the labour market. While these policies seem promising in some respects, their real effects on the most vulnerable groups have been mixed, and in some cases harmful. For Roma, who as a group, are most in need of the assistance and the re-integration promised by the welfare state, these new social assistance schemes may pose a serious danger. Due to the interplay of multiple exclusionary factors as well as open discrimination, Roma are often unable to access and benefit from these measures. When these measures fail to lead to jobs, as they often do, Roma are left with no work and no social assistance, victims of more "efficient," and less just, welfare policy.
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Roma Rights 4/2006: Romani Women's Rights Movement
(Last modified: 2007-04-27 19:00:28)
The current issue of Roma Rights issue looks at the responses of Romani women to some of the human rights violations Romani women face. The Romani women's movement has evolved organically through the wider pursuit of Roma rights by Romani women and men over the years in response to the initial (and mostly continuing) lack of attention to women's issues on the part of the predominantly male "leaders"; some of whom viewed patriarchal traditions as integral components of Romani identity and culture. Romani women's first steps to speak out about their rights as women and to challenge the idea that certain practices are a part of Romani culture have often been met with criticism, rejection or have been simply ignored. The fact is that women's rights in all contexts tend to be a cause of controversy, but particularly when in juxtaposition with other characteristics such as race or ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, etc. This issue provides a few examples of current Romani women's actions and reflections.
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Roma Rights 2/2005: Rights and Traditions
(Last modified: 2005-07-28 12:22:42)
 | | | Aneta Caspar,25, sits in front of her home with her son Pardalian Martocean, 2, in Ferneziu, Romania. Photo: Julie Denesha |
Practices such as early and arranged marriages and certain sexual taboos in Romani communities restrict the autonomy of individuals, deprive them of their human dignity and prevent them from realising basic human rights. Romani girls’ educational carreers are often interrupted at early stages as a result of marriage. Many women are not able to undertake public activities due to pressures exerted by family and community conditioned by traditional perceptions limiting the role of the woman to the family sphere. Homosexuality is considered an abomination in many communities.
The debate about the conflict of individual rights with traditional practices is now taking place among Roma. Beyond the arguments of the many sides in the debate, however, it is important to see the political implications of this debate. Awareness about contradictions between human rights and customary practices has left the private sphere. Resistance is no longer an intuitive reaction by a few brave individuals – youths, women or others – who do not accept the limitations of community tradition.
Questioning issues considered by many Roma to be taboo not only has the potential to catalyse processes within Romani communities of rethinking their relevance. It also poses a challenge to the perception of Roma by large parts of the majority as a homogenous mass of people trapped in the “primitiveness” of their own traditions. Furthermore, as seen in the pages of this issue of Roma Rights, the problematisation of the contradiction between rights and traditions exposes a host of problems related to the inequalities facing Roma in society, resulting from past and present discrimination condoned and unremedied by states. Thus, the debate about human rights and tradition also betrays the arrogant stance often adopted by governments, blaming “Romani tradition” for the failure of states to fulfil basic duties. In this way, this debate, held publicly, adds strength to the fight against anti-Romani racism.
This issue of Roma Rights examines matters related to a dual dynamic: on the one hand, abusive practices perpetrated on Roma by Roma in the name of “traditional culture”, and the general abandonment by the state of the victims to the perpetrators; on the other hand, a tendency by state officials to treat social problems in the Romani community with draconian and disproportionate measures. In this way, we look at embedded traditions leading to the systemic frustration of rights: traditions giving rise to abuses by Romani perpetrators, and traditions of abuse arising from state practices taking aim at Roma and Romani traditions. We aim to provide a forum for voices within the Romani community working to combat abusive traditional practices. We also try to set in focus the context fostering abusive community practices.
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Roma Rights 2/2004: Ethnic Statistics
(Last modified: 2004-07-30 08:42:09)
In 2004, the complaint that there are no reliable statistics on Roma has become trivial. So has the call on governments to collect them. Criticism and recommendations regarding this issue are coming from all quarters, including governments of countries with significant Romani populations. Over the last six-seven years, the European Roma Rights Center has been among the most consistent advocates of collecting ethnic data for purposes of fighting racism and discrimination and for drafting viable equality programmes. Our position has been initially developed in the context of implementing anti-discrimination law to benefit the members of the most disadvantaged groups in European societies. More recently, as part of accession obligations, governments of European Union candidate countries worked with the Employment and Social Affairs Directorate of the European Commission on Joint Inclusion Memoranda, to be followed by National Action Plans. In the process, the deficiency of reliable Roma-related statistics loomed large as a major obstacle to rights based policy of Roma inclusion. The ERRC addressed the issue in most of its advocacy interventions in this regard.
This issue of Roma Rights revisits and recapitulates Roma statistics from several angles. Andrei Ivanov and Susanne Milcher present the UNDP experience in assessing the development needs of Roma in Eastern Europe. Ferenc Babusik reveals the dilemmas that Hungarian sociology has been trying to solve when collecting data on Roma. Lilla Farkas looks at the issue from the prism of international law, revealing the paradoxical epistemological situation of knowing while not knowing the numbers of Roma. Sasha Barton comments on the British practice of ethnic monitoring and presents grounds for optimism even as it transpires that Gypsies and Travellers in the UK have not benefitted from ethnic monitoring. Claude Cahn notes that the European Union has not yet provided meaningful guidance on ethnic statistics.
Together, the articles take the Roma rights approach to ethnic statistics to a new level, by building a more detailed case for numbers and percentages.This effort is meant as a response to the positive tendency to step beyond rhetoric and to get down to business in many of the departments where Romarelated programmes and projects are being drafted. |
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Roma Rights 3/2003: Personal Documents and Access to Fundamental Rights
(Last modified: 2004-07-07 07:47:58)
Roma Rights 3/2003 takes as its theme "Personal Documents and Access to Fundamental Rights". Research shows that numerous Roma around Europe - and particularly in countries emerging from the dissolution of large federations such as the former Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia remain disproportionately affected by a lack of personal documents, including birth certificates, identity documents, residence permits, documents proving eligibility for state-provided social welfare and health insurance, and passports. Roma are frequently unable to access citizenship, and the anathema phenomenon of statelessness has arisen in a number of states. The lack of one document leads to the inability, in many cases, to access others. The inability of Roma to access such basic personal documents has given rise to a situation in which their ability to access services crucial to the realisation of a number of fundamental rights and freedoms is threatened and, in many cases, denied. Due to a lack of personal documents, many Roma are barred in practice from registering to vote, registering residences, and accessing rights to health care, education, employment and social benefits. Roma living in regions affected by state succession and massive forced migrations, such as the war-affected former Yugoslav countries, are particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. Apart from localised actions by some non-governmental organisations, little work to date has been undertaken to remedy this problem. |
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Roma Rights 2/2002: Fortress Europe
(Last modified: 2004-08-25 15:36:40)
The ERRC’s first publication ever addressed the theme of “Fortress Europe” – restrictive laws, policies and practices in Europe aimed at or resulting in the exclusion of non-citizens. Divide and Deport: Roma and Sinti in Austria, published in September 1996, examined Roma rights issues generally in Austria, but was particularly preoccupied with Roma who had arrived in Austria in recent decades, since as a result among other things of the Holocaust, these comprised an estimated 5/6 of Austria’s Romani population. Divide and Deport described in detail the legal and administrative scaffolding which, taken as a whole and in combination with a powerful and discursive local hostility to “Gypsies”, was rendering life with dignity close to impossible for the greater part of Austria’s Roma. Divide and Deport quotes a 1995 study indicating that the three major German-speaking countries – Austria, Germany and Switzerland – had particularly problematic records with respect to the integration of foreigners, more so than other European states. Would such a statement be true today? |
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Roma Rights 4/2001: Mobilisation/participation
(Last modified: 2004-09-03 14:30:00)
Two major events of autumn at the ERRC were the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and a lawsuit against the United Kingdom in connection with the practice of stationing liaison officers at the Prague airport, apparently to stop Roma from coming to Britain.
The ERRC sent a delegation of more than fifty activists (about forty of them Romani) to the World Conference. Our group was huge even by the standards of the massive event in Durban. Our aims were maximum visibility and the establishment of the Romani issue as among Europe's most pressing race concerns. Morag Goodwin, who accompanied the ERRC delegation, describes in these pages ERRC efforts surrounding the World Conference, and we also publish in this issue the speech of Anna Červeňáková, another one of the members of the ERRC delegation in Durban, to the NGO Forum preceding the main governmental event. Also included here is an ERRC press release, issued after the ERRC joined a statement with a number of other NGOs, primarily from Central and Eastern Europe, distancing ourselves from the documents adopted at the NGO Forum. |
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Roma Rights 2-3/2001: Government programmes on Roma
(Last modified: 2004-09-09 13:25:43)
This issue’s special theme is governmental policy programmes related to Roma. We offer critical comments on the existing programmes and the policy-making processes in several countries: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain. However, I should note several ERRC assumptions that may have remained only very implicit in this issue.
Most importantly, the main target of our concerns in the area of governmental policies is missing here: the governments which have not developed any Roma-related programmes at all. It may be argued that a bad programme is worse than no programme. The articles in this issue suggest rather that the contrary is true. Policy making everywhere has turned out to be a long and unfinished process: it goes through stages, overcomes resistance from various actors, is prone to regress, followed by seemingly sudden leaps forward, and in some cases produces quite good results, at least on paper. The process is, in other words, markedly political. It is all about power and empowerment, opposition of group interests and negotiated agreements. Roma in Italy, Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine – to name just a few places where no comprehensive, specifically-targeted governmental policy programmes have been adopted – may gain from looking at the experience of those Roma who have been involved in this complex undertaking: getting the government do its job of complying with international and constitutional obligations, and even working together with the government to ensure that Roma rights are protected and Romani interests are promoted. |
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Roma Rights 4/2000: Racism: denial and acknowledgement
(Last modified: 2004-09-15 13:52:00)
The ERRC works to end racism. We “fight” racism, to use the clumsy metaphor. In doing so, we tilt at shadows, aiming to bring to an end phenomena hard to grasp and actions the symbolic content of which is frequently disputed. We are joined in this “struggle” by the Czech Republic, which, like all other European states with the exception of Andorra, Ireland and Turkey, has converted the commitment to end racism to legal obligation by ratifying the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. In this work, either states aspire to real race-blindness in their own affairs and abandon documenting race once and for all; or states engage to determine discriminatory patterns by gathering data to use in the service of ending discriminatory practices. Lying about the existence of registries, however, stinks. |
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Roma Rights 3/2000: Rights of the Child
(Last modified: 2004-09-17 14:53:54)
The classical human rights doctrine posits that every human being, born free and equal in dignity and rights, endowed with a free will, is capacitated to make free choices. The free will is a transparent, self-reflective agency, expressing the individual’s interest. The individual subject, a bearer of rights, is in principle an indivisible and autonomous entity, interacting only with other, equally free subjects of rights. Thus, the classical human rights paradigm leaves out of consideration the whole process of “becoming” a conscious bearer of rights. Its point of departure is the terminal point at which the process of achieving rights capacity is already accomplished. As to women, children, and the various categories of incompetent persons, their “personhood” is deemed incomplete, their rights and capacity to choose rationally — restricted. They are in need of custody — by fathers, husbands, parents, guardians, doctors, and other mature subjects. |
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Roma Rights 3/1999: Competing Romani Identities
(Last modified: 2004-09-27 14:58:38)
The ERRC is an organisation working on Roma rights. As such, we have tried to stay away from questions of Romani identity, defining our scope in an empirical, non-doctrinal way. We have developed an expertise on the RIGHTS of Roma - their expression in law, their monitoring in the field, their defence in the courts, and their advocacy in a variety of frameworks. But we have not developed an expertise, not even a consistent position, on ROMA: who are they, are they the same people most of the world still recognises as "Gypsies", what is specific about their culture, which groups are comprised in the Romani identity, what are the chief characteristics of this identity? We know from mountains of research material that roma are systematically subjected to abusive and discriminatory treatment. Being a human rights organisation, we need no more to act: we have human rights work to do. Whoever the Roma may be, Roma rights are human rights. |
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Roma Rights 1/1999: Forced Migration
(Last modified: 2004-10-20 13:47:57)
The ERRC, as well as many others, have been reporting racial assaults often resulting in deaths and injuries; invasions into private homes by armed police; looting, burning and evictions, sometimes of whole Romani communities; and constant problems in acquiring or maintaining citizenship and residence. Very few people have expressed sympathy or solidarity with the Roma. Officials at home have announced that they are to blame for their own misfortune. Asylum authorities, backed by politicians in the democratic West, have declared them to be economic migrants. Panicked by several hundred Romani applicants, European countries have tightened their immigration laws to prevent what the British press once called the "Gypsy invasion".
Roma have been, for much of their history, forced migrants, many of them real; and all of them potential. Roma are a persecuted people with no mainstream media to cover their tortured journeys, no safe haven across any border, and no military alliances to interfere in their defence. |
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Roma Rights Autumn 1998: Legal Defence
(Last modified: 2004-10-21 13:39:28)
A major preoccupation of the ERRC is litigation in defense of Roma rights. But, people might ask, are all Roma rights cases also public interest law cases? The Assenov case was innovative from a purely legal point of view, regardless of the fact that Assenov is of Romani origin: it set a procedural guarantee of the right under Article 3. The court stated that "where an individual raised an arguable claim that he had been seriously ill-treated by agents of the State unlawfully and in breach of Article 3, that provision, read in conjunction with the State's general duty under Article 1 of the Convention to "secure to everyone within their jurisdiction the rights and freedoms in [the] Convention", required by implication that there should be an effective official investigation, capable of leading to the identification and punishment of those responsible. If this were not the case, the general legal prohibition of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment, despite its fundamental importance, would be ineffective in practice and it would be possible in some cases for agents of the State to abuse the rights of those within their control with virtual impunity". (Brief and simplified paraphrase: not only torture itself, but failure to properly investigate allegations of torture is a violation of the right to be free from torture.) In the Yordanov case, the very launching of that case, with its ambitious goals, was seen as lunatic by most professionals standing by. The ingenious way in which an existing domestic law was harnessed to challenge police violence committed by unidentified officers was a precedent. |
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Roma Rights Spring, 1998: Racially motivated violence against Roma
(Last modified: 2004-11-22 11:17:53)
Racially motivated civilian violence against Roma is the focus of this issue. It comes in various forms, from skinhead assaults to mob law, and leaves behind death, handicap, and pain, physical as well as mental. Competing with police violence in scope, intensity and impunity, civilian violence against Roma has been documented since 1989 in most post-communist countries of Europe: Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. |
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Roma Rights, Winter 1998: Police Violence against Roma
(Last modified: 2004-11-22 17:02:57)
In fighting police brutality, we have relied upon two methods. First of all, we have collected and disseminated information about violations of Roma rights by police. We have described the most disturbing cases of abuse in our reports. Secondly, we have sued police officers and institutions and have assisted others in doing the same; in the best of cases (and more such cases will likely come), law enforcement officials were sent to prison. Now that these two methods have been usefully explored, we look forward to a third method: dialogue. Once the Roma and the lawyers have begun to form an alliance, it is time to invite to the table the missing party: the police. We are prepared to start a discussion, a genuine dialogue, with the police. This will be a kind of human rights education, provided that all parties will be both trainers and students. |
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