Czech Minister's letter on ending segregation of Romani children in practical schools welcomed by international organisations
2 February 2010
London, Budapest, New York (2 February 2010): International human rights organisations today cautiously welcomed Czech Minister of Education, Youth and Sports Miroslava Kopicová's letter to elementary school directors of 19 January 2010, calling on the Ministry to ensure that only pupils with a "genuine mild mental disability are assigned to the practical elementary schools."
Amnesty International, the European Roma Rights Centre and the Open Society Justice Initiative emphasized in their communication that this letter constitutes an important general message to Czech schools to end their practice of segregating Romani children. However, the three organisations also underlined that the Minister's initiative must be followed up by concrete and clear guidance and implementation to ensure that Romani children take their place alongside non-Roma in mainstream education.
The three co-signing organisations pointed out that "the content of this letter simply reaffirms existing provisions of Czech education law." As the Minister's letter itself confirms, 26% of Romani children are currently attending schools established for pupils with mild mental disabilities a number that is vastly disproportionate to their population size. The Minister noted that it is highly unlikely that the number of children of Roma origin with such mental disability is actually this high.
In their communication, the co-signing organisations called on the Minister to affirm clearly her support for the desegregation of Czech schools by commencing efforts to transfer Romani children from practical to standard primary schools under a concrete timeline, passing legislation creating a duty to desegregate Czech schools, preventing the wrongful placement of Romani and other children in practical schools through an immediate moratorium on their admission to such schools, providing appropriate support to pupils and families, making publicly available the concrete guidelines to be provided to school directors and clarifying publicly how the Ministry intends to monitor and evaluate the implementation of its broad school integration goals.
The full text of the letter to the Czech Minister of Education, Youth and Sports Miroslava Kopicová is available here in EN.
The full text of the letter to the Czech Minister of Education, Youth and Sports Miroslava Kopicová is available here in CZ.
For further information, please contact:
Robert Kushen, ERRC Managing Director, rob.kushen@errc.org Sinan Gokcen, ERRC Media and Communications Officer, sinan.gokcen@errc.org, +36 30 500 1324
