European court rules against Bulgaria for outrageous anti-Roma hate speech
18 May 2026
In two related rulings on Tuesday, May 12, concerning notorious hate speeches by far-right extremist politician Valeri Simeonov, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) stated that it was beyond doubt that they “amounted to extreme negative stereotyping meant to vilify Roma in Bulgaria and stir up prejudice and hatred towards them.” In both cases the court ruled that domestic civil courts in Bulgaria failed to take account of the impact of such speech on mainstream political debate and public opinion, and consequently failed to meet their positive obligation to afford redress to Roma applicants for extreme negative stereotyping statements made by leader of political party.
The Court rejected the Bulgarian government’s contention that statements made by the politician were "isolated comments" which constituted political speech, meant chiefly to confront his political opponents. Simeonov had described Roma as “brazen, arrogant and brutalised humanoids”, and female Roma as “women with the instincts of street-bitches.”
Bulgarian Helsinki Committee lawyer Iveta Savova, who represented applicants in one of the cases, told Eunseo Hong from Courthouse News, that the rulings mark an important shift in how the court approaches anti-Roma hate speech, and strengthen “the idea that harm can be ‘group-based’ and affect the dignity of individual members of a community even if they are not personally named.” Also, she said that “the judgments warn national courts against treating the balance between free speech and minority protection like a mechanical box-ticking exercise, especially when influential public figures use rhetoric reinforcing ethnic prejudice and exclusion.”
The rulings serve as a further indictment of the failures of Bulgarian courts when it comes to anti-Roma racism, and in these cases, their inability to conduct a proper balancing exercise between the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 and the right to respect for private life under Article 8. The domestic courts stood accused of having “minimised and rationalised the language that Mr Simeonov had used, portrayed his statements as a mere discussion on issues of public concern, and disregarded the statements’ discriminatory character and their exploitation of habitual anti-Roma imagery.”
The Court gave short shrift to the Bulgarian government’s claim that the speeches “had not amounted to a vehement anti-Roma campaign, but had been intended … to expose the social problems of part of the Roma community rather than stigmatise all Roma”; and its contention that, as the statements had no impact on the applicant’s social environment, the “requisite threshold of severity had therefore not been reached, and the applicants’ ‘private life’ had thus not been affected.”
In its third-party intervention, the ERRC drew attention to the pervasiveness of discrimination against Roma, their disadvantaged social position, and the widespread use of racist rhetoric against them, in particular by politicians, which it described as ‘antigypsyism’. The ERRC stated that this distinct form of racism is so prevalent, the Court had to accept that individual Roma should be able to bring legal challenges against hate speech directed against their community as a whole.
The Court rightly assessed that the impugned statements were capable of having such an impact on the sense of identity and self-worth of Roma in Bulgaria, to have reached the level required to affect the applicants’ ‘private life’.
As reported in Courthouse News, when Romani activists and journalists first sued under Bulgaria’s anti-discrimination laws, one Bulgarian court agreed that some of Simeonov’s language crossed into discriminatory harassment. This was later overturned by higher courts which sided with Simeonov’s argument that he was discussing crime and social breakdown affecting only part of the Roma community; and ruled that the applicants failed to prove the speeches caused concrete personal harm or created a hostile enough environment. The applicants then took the case to Strasbourg.
In judging severity and as to whether Article 8 applied, the courts considered the interplay of three factors, the characteristics of the group, the content of the speeches, and the likely impact. The Court has long acknowledged the disadvantaged and vulnerable position of Roma and the need for their special protection, and has specifically emphasised the need to combat their negative stereotyping.
As for content, Simeonov was judged to have used deliberately dehumanising and inflammatory language to “portray Roma in Bulgaria as prone to crime and depravity, and the overall thrust of his message was that they are immoral social parasites who abuse their rights, live off the Bulgarian majority, and subject that majority to systematic violence and crime without hindrance.” For the Court it was beyond doubt that this extreme negative stereotyping was meant to vilify Roma in Bulgaria and stir up prejudice and hatred towards them.
Concerning the likely impact, and considering that on both occasions Simeonov’s toxic racist diatribes were delivered from the rostrum of Bulgaria’s Parliament, on behalf of his entire parliamentary group, the Court found that “it can be accepted that his statements reached a wide audience and had a high visibility.”
As to the longer term impact of politically-orchestrated anti-Roma hate speech by Bulgaria’s far-right mobsters in parliament, the concerns expressed by the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner over the increase of hate-motivated violence targeting Roma, gave some measure of the gravity of the situation in the years after Simeonov’s first interventions. She noted in 2019 that information received by ECRI from NGOs confirmed reports “that most racist attacks in the country are committed against Roma and that hostility against them has increased in recent years, as indicated by anti-Roma attacks which took place in several localities across Bulgaria, forcing hundreds of Roma to leave their homes and rendering many of them homeless or destitute.”
The lesson from Bulgaria is that there is a direct link between incitement to commit violence against Roma and actual incidents of racist violence, which in some cases amounted to 21st Century pogroms. It is to be hoped that these latest judgements will prompt the Bulgarian authorities to counter anti-Roma hate speech more effectively. It is likely that it will be many years before the authorities or the courts will actually rise to this challenge.
