Weckles: The New Minority Making a Joke of Roma Rights
10 April 2017
The Weckles arrived in Europe in 2010. They are a small minority. If you speak English, you can usually understand them, but not always. In that case, French helps.
Most people don’t care very much about them. But Roma should care. Because they are causing trouble for Europe’s biggest minority. They have started making a joke of Romani claims for justice.
I’m spelling their name wrong, actually. It’s “WECL”, not “Weckle”, but only an insider would know how to pronounce that.
Or what it stands for: well-established case law.
If you’re thinking I’m nerdy or ridiculous, hear me out.
Since 2010, three-judge committees of the European Court of Human Rights can deliver judgements in cases of human rights violations when those cases involve applying the Court’s “well-established case law”. This was meant to make the European Court faster. Usually, judgements are delivered by Chambers of seven judges (and occasionally by Grand Chambers of seventeen). Fewer judges means more judgements. And lots of cases involve questions that the Court has already ruled on. So committee judgements are efficient.
WECL cases are a minority of the case law: in 2016, for example, the Court delivered 310 Committee judgments (from three judges) out of a total of 993 judgments. And they are a silent minority: the Court does not give press-release summaries of these cases, and because they are considered so run-of-the-mill as not to deserve the usual seven-judge treatment, they are especially likely to go unnoticed.
Which is why you probably did not notice a Committee judgement on 14 March 2017 in Fogarasi v Romania. And because it’s a French-speaking Weckle, you may be even less likely to engage with it.
How fucked up you think the events are that led to the judgement depends on how much you know about Roma and the police. In this case, a Romani family was holding a party. The police came to tell them to lower the music, which they did. An hour later the police came back. Why? Who knows. But the police tried to arrest the dad. The family resisted and a fight broke out. A neighbour hit the dad over the head with a hammer. His wife threw stones at the police car, injuring no one. The police left, with a video recording. A little while later, as the family were leaving a pharmacy and headed towards the hospital, to get treatment for Dad, special forces police showed up and arrested the whole family. Their versions of what happened from there differ, with the family (including the teenage daughter) alleging severe mistreatment. It is clear that the parents suffered significant injuries, which hospital records from after their release prove.
These kinds of cases are not uncommon. We see police misconduct all the time. Romania has been condemned in a string of judgements for police brutality against Roma. And based on its “well-established case law” the Court had no trouble finding that the applicants in this case had suffered a violation of their right to be free from inhuman and degrading treatment (Article 3 of the European Convention). But the Court also found no discrimination on the part of the authorities.
That’s right – no discrimination. Apparently this had nothing to do with the family being Romani.
This is the Court’s well-established case law: it will only find that police brutality against Roma was discriminatory if the victim has proved it “beyond reasonable doubt”. This case is not so much well established as bloody-minded. The Court persists with a high standard of proof that flies in the face of the way anti-discrimination law works in every other court in Europe (where the burden of proof easily shifts to the defendant). It is also ineffective at reducing the Court’s case load. Despite a set of judgements against Romania concerning police brutality against Roma, cases keep coming.
This is now the second Committee judgement concerning police brutality in the past year. Putting these cases to three-judge committees ratifies the Court’s bad jurisprudence and insults Roma by relegating serious police abuse to the back pages of the record. The ERRC submitted a third-party intervention in Fogarasi to show the Court that something important is going on here. Where we saw dangerous racist abuse taking place when Roma are conveyed to police stations in Romania, the Court saw “same old”.
We should be pissed off. Police nearly beating the life out of Roma is torture and deserves wide publicity and a searching examination under the Convention’s non-discrimination principles, which are clearly not working for Roma.
This judgement is shameful. Romani victims of police brutality deserve better.
