International Romani Day 2026: This Is Not the Time for Gestures
08 April 2026
By Jonathan Lee & the European Roma Rights Centre
Every year on the 8th of April, institutions across Europe mark International Romani Day with statements of solidarity, carefully worded commitments, and social media posts featuring flags and Romani music. It is a day that we at the European Roma Rights Centre welcome, and one we wish reflected the reality on the ground more closely. For Europe's largest ethnic minority, the gap between words of celebration and the lived experience of discrimination has never been wider, and the forces working to widen it further have never been more emboldened as they are today.
This year, we want to be honest about that gap. This is not the moment for gestures. It is the moment for clarity about what is happening, who is responsible, and what the rest of us, Roma and non-Roma alike, are going to do about it.
The origin of the day
The 8th of April marks the anniversary of the first World Roma Congress, held in Cannock House boarding school, in South London in 1971. It was there that 23 Romani delegates of the International Gypsy Committee, representing 10 countries, gathered for the first time, and adopted a flag (the sixteen-spoked red chakra on a green field and a blue sky) and anthem (Gelem gelem) as shared cultural symbols of a people who, across many countries and many centuries, had been subjected to persecution, forced assimilation, and erasure.
That gathering took place in the long shadow of the Pharrajimos: the Romani genocide, in which between 500,000 and 1.5 million Romani people were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators; a genocide that Europe spent decades refusing to name, let alone reckon with. The meeting on the 8th of April was a culmination of the activism that had arisen over the decades since the Second World War and now asserted itself and a shared identity which proclaimed Romani existence, Romani culture, and Romani rights. This alone was a significant act in the history of Romani people on this continent. The flag and the anthem that came out of that Congress belong to Romani people and to the modern Roma Rights movement that has grown from those roots. They are not the property of any one political tendency within it.
What matters on this anniversary is not the ideological disputes that have followed in subsequent decades, but the simple, durable truth that those early activists insisted upon: Romani people, as citizens of the countries in which they live, are owed full and equal rights under the law. That remains the starting point, and the finishing line, of everything we do.
Fifty-five years on, the Romani civil rights movement is more necessary than ever, and also more threatened.
The demands of the moment
Let us be direct about the political moment we are in.
Across Europe in 2025 and into 2026, the far right has moved from the fringes to the mainstream with a speed that should alarm every person with at least a cursory appreciation of democracy, equality, and the rule of law. Parties that built their platforms on ethnic scapegoating, on "great replacement" conspiracy theories, on nativist fantasies of racial and cultural purity, have entered governments, won elections, and in some cases are setting the agenda for the entire European project. Romani communities, alongside other racialized groups, have been among the first to feel the consequences.
In Hungary, far-right Mi Hazánk and their associated paramilitaries and vigilante groups are operating a political platform and street movements based almost entirely on antigypsyism. The thuggish Bűnvadászok (Crime hunters) vigilante group conduct targeted raids on Romani families in precarious housing situations where they do not have legal tenure: breaking down doors, issuing threats, and filming their intimidation for a YouTube audience of hundreds of thousands. The leader of the Mi Hazánk-affiliated Betyársereg (Outlaw Army), Tyirityán Zsolt, delivered a speech last year openly declaring that "Roma rights advocacy is a form of subhuman existence"; explicit dehumanisation using Nazi racial terminology, delivered through a megaphone at a public rally in Szolnok in September 2025.
Hungary has also proscribed antifascism, "Antifa," as a terrorist ideology, following the lead of Donald Trump's United States, with Prime Minister Orbán proudly stating "we will follow the American model." Shortly afterwards, twelve years of Roma rights monitoring reports disappeared from the website of Hungary's Office of the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights, among the last remaining sources of official documentation of Roma rights violations in the country. History is not only being repeated; it is being deleted.
In Italy, anti-Roma racism has become so normalised that it is visible not just in the persistence of mass evictions and demolitions of Romani camps, but in the openly dehumanising language that accompanies them. In North Macedonia, an eight-year-old Romani boy was forced at knifepoint to kneel and kiss his attackers' shoes, the incident filmed and shared on Facebook. In France, a mayor and five residents were acquitted after organising a violent mob that drove 150 Romani people from their homes, with residents shouting they would burn out the "parasites."
These are not isolated incidents. Across Europe in 2025, the ever-growing far-right mobilisation against multiculturalism and minorities of all kinds meant that Romani people continued to be singled out for collective blame and punishment by nativist politicians and neo-fascist groups. We are moving past the time of dog-whistle politics and entering a stage of outright fascist violence and rhetoric of the kind that has not been seen for many decades. What we are seeing now is an alarmingly similar pattern of events to those occurring at the beginning of the last century events that ultimately led to catastrophic war and genocide.
This Concerns Everyone
There is a temptation, particularly among those who do not face these threats personally, to view what is happening to Romani communities as a “Roma problem”. It is not.
The targeting of minority groups has always been both a symptom and a tool of authoritarian politics and the dehumanisation of Romani communities, and other racialized peoples, does not happen in isolation. It happens alongside the dismantling of judicial independence, the erosion of press freedom, the criminalisation of civil society, and the systematic weakening of the institutions that protect everyone's rights. When a government deletes twelve years of human rights reports, it is not only Roma who should be alarmed. When a paramilitary group terrorises families in their homes with impunity, it is not only Roma who lose something. When politicians can talk openly about the “dirty Gypsy” who lives “in the shit, among the rats, with parents who steal”, and pass laws targeting Romani communities with state violence, or imprisonment of mothers and children, it is only a matter of time before the tolerated groups become smaller and the list of those being targeted grows longer.
The rights of minorities are the canary in the coal mine of democracy, and we are probably already past the point of warning signs for Europe. Romani communities have understood this for a long time, from bitter experience. We know what it means when politicians start counting us, blaming us, and promising to "deal with" us. We know where that road leads. We have the mass graves to prove it.
Beyond Solidarity: A Call to Action
International Romani Day has often been marked by expressions of solidarity from non-Roma allies, civil society organisations, and institutional bodies. While Roma Rights activists are grateful for every genuine expression of support, solidarity, as it is currently practised, is not enough.
Solidarity that does not translate into action when Roma rights are attacked is not solidarity. It is sympathy, and sympathy changes nothing. What the moment demands is active, mutual defence of rights across communities: the understanding that an attack on the rights of one group is an attack on the rights of all and must be treated as such.
This means non-Roma human rights organisations and activists speaking up loudly and specifically when Romani communities are targeted, not as a footnote to their other work, but as a central concern. It means trade unions, LGBTIQ+ organisers, disability rights groups, feminist movements, refugee activists, and faith communities recognising that the political forces coming for Roma are the same forces coming for them. It means journalists interrogating the anti-Roma rhetoric of mainstream politicians with the same rigour they would afford to any other form of hatred. It means lawyers, academics, and policymakers treating antigypsyism not as a cultural curiosity but as a structural form of racism with legal consequences.
The same goes for the Roma Rights movement. For too long, many of our comrades have been selective in their solidarity for other racialized and minority groups. If we expect others to stand up for us, we must do the same for them. Every person who believes in a Europe built on human rights, pluralism, and the equal dignity of all people, must stop treating the far-right as someone else's emergency. If we as Roma Rights activists have been guilty of looking away in the past, we must step up to this obligation now.
What can we do about it?
The ERRC will not be marking International Romani Day with a statement of celebration but a with a clarion call. We will be doing what we do every day: taking racists to court, documenting abuses, training activists, and holding states to account under the law. We have cases pending across Europe. We have clients, real people with names and families, whose rights have been violated and who deserve justice.
But we cannot do it alone, and we should not have to. The fight for Roma rights is not a niche cause for specialists. It is a front line in the broader struggle for the kind of Europe we want to live in.
On this International Romani Day, we call on every ally, every institution, and every person of conscience to move beyond symbolic gestures and ask themselves a harder question: when the rights of Romani people in my country, my city, my community are under attack, what am I actually doing about it?
The Romani civil rights movement that grew from the 1971 congress was built on one insistence: that Romani people, in all their diversity, across all the countries of Europe, are rights-bearing citizens who will not accept less than full equality under the law. That insistence is as urgent now as it has ever been. Defending it is everyone's responsibility.
