The rhetoric and reality of Roma rights
“It’s about Europe. It’s about you.” So goes the official slogan marking
2013 as the European Year of Citizens. But, if you happen to be one of the
European Union’s six million Roma, you might well be forgiven for doubting the
inclusiveness of such rhetoric.
As we celebrate International Roma Day on 8 April, one of Europe’s largest
ethnic minorities faces increasingly widespread discrimination, racially
motivated violence, forced evictions and segregation. More than a decade after EU
anti-discrimination laws were adopted, EU member states are failing to enforce
these laws to combat this discrimination.
The 2000 EU Race Equality Directive clearly prohibits discrimination on
grounds of race and ethnicity in a variety of areas including access to goods
and services, social protection, health, housing, employment and
education. Nevertheless, as our new
briefing – Human rights here, Roma rights now: A wake-up call for the European
Union – points out, discriminatory policies and practices against the Roma in
all these areas are still common in EU member states, and, to date, the
European Commission has failed to challenge them effectively.
In the area of housing, Amnesty International and other organizations have
documented forced evictions of Roma communities in several EU countries,
including Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, Romania and Slovenia. Forcibly
evicted Romani communities and individuals are often relocated in segregated
residential areas, in some cases close to polluted sites or in houses that do
not comply with basic habitability standards.
Often unable to afford rents in the private housing market, hundreds of
thousands of Roma in Europe are nonetheless denied other options, including
social housing. In recent weeks, for
example, the municipal authorities in Rome have clarified that Romani people
living in camps will not be considered for priority access to social housing
claiming they live already in “permanent structures”.
In terms of education, tens of thousands of Romani pupils in the Czech
Republic, Slovakia and Greece attend segregated Roma-only schools and classes
or institutions for students with “mild mental disability” where they are
taught a reduced curriculum. When Romi, a Romani child in Ostrava, Czech
Republic, was asked why he was not studying a foreign language as he would do
in a mainstream school, his answer was as simple as it was poignant: “We are
not primary school children, we are practical school children.”
Faced with such serious human rights violations by EU member states, it is
hard to understand why the European Commission has not yet acted more swiftly
and strongly.
The EU’s executive body certainly has considerable powers to do so. It can
initiate infringement proceedings against any of the 27 member states whose
policies or practices are contrary to EU law, including the Race Equality
Directive.
In other fields of EU law, the Commission is not so reluctant to use these
powers. In fact, it opens hundreds of infringement proceedings every year
ranging from environmental issues and taxation to the internal market and
transport. Some proceedings even concern failures to transpose the Race
Equality Directive into national laws. Nevertheless, not a single proceeding
has been carried out to date against member states whose policies or practices
are discriminatory against the Roma, or indeed any other ethnic group.
By refraining from taking strong action the EU institutions are failing to
hold Member States accountable for how they treat Roma people. In 2010, for
instance, the Commission backed off from an initial threat to open an
infringement proceeding against France for its policy of specifically targeting
Roma with forced evictions and of returning them to their countries of
origin. On 14 March 2013, the French
Minister of Interior, Manuel Valls, publicly confirmed that the policy of
evicting informal Romani settlements will be pursued but did not clarify how
safeguards against forced evictions will be implemented.
The Commission must start using all the instruments at its disposal to
tackle the multiple forms of discrimination, racism and other human rights
violations experienced by the Roma in Europe, including by firmly holding EU
Member States accountable for violating EU anti-discrimination law.
The EU prides itself on being “founded on the principles of liberty,
democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms”, but daily
discrimination against Roma starkly shows that the EU has yet to translate
these principles into reality for one of Europe’s largest ethnic minorities.
“It’s about Europe. It’s about you” must hold true for all in Europe –
including Roma.
Today we launch our campaign “Human rights here, Roma rights now”. Please
join us. Call on the European Commission to take decisive action to end
discrimination against Roma, here and now.
By Nicolas Beger, Director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions
Office
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