Roma Rights Summer 1998: Roma and the right to education

10 September 1998

The most outrageous form of denial of the educational rights of Roma is, ironically, typical of the comparatively successful new democracies, the Czech Republic and Hungary. In these and some other countries, Romani children are streamed to so called "special schools", or "special classes". What is special about them is that they are designed as substandard educational programs for kids with developmental or mental disability. Rather than compensating alleged disability and integrating allegedly handicapped youths, they are a sure and final departure from equal opportunities, an unmistakable stigma for all who have been once referred to them. The fact is that Romani children are hugely over-represented and in some places make up to 95 percent of such institutions.

• Agrammatos (Dimitrina Petrova) 

• Projects in Romani education: Bulgaria (Khristo Kyuchukov)  

• Bosnia and Herzegovina * Bulgaria * Czech Republic * France * Greece * Hungary * Italy * Kosovo * Poland * Romania * Slovakia * Slovenia * United Kingdom * Yugoslavia 

• Everyone has the right to education (Article 26: Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)) 

• Roma in the educational systems of central and eastern Europe (Claude Cahn, David Chirico, Christina McDonald, Viktória Mohácsi, Tatjana Perić and Ágnes Székely) 

• Discrimination in education: some thoughts on American law and experience (John Vail) 

• The education of Romanies and other Travellers in England and Wales (Donald Kenrick)  

• Things a teacher can't forget (Svetlana Vassileva) 

• How young Roma live (Vojtĕch Lavička)  

• The ERRC in Croatia (Savelina Danova and Rumyan Russinov)  

• Seminar on domestic and international aspects of the legal protection of Roma (Nikolai Gughinski)  

• Killing by skinheads in Bulgaria (Letter of concern to the Bulgarian Minister of Interior, Mr Bogomil Bonev and the Bulgarian General Prosecutor, Mr Ivan Tatarchev; Reply from the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior)  

• Death of a Romani man in police custody in Portugal (Paul Summers) 

• Chronicle