European Roma Rights Centre
ERRC
The European Roma Rights Centre (“ERRC”) is a Roma-led organisation whose vision is for Romani women and men to overcome antigypsyism and its legacy, to achieve dignity, equality, and full respect for their human rights, and to use their experience to contribute to a more just and sustainable world.
ID: 201496333876-92
Lobbying Activity
Response to Assessing the implementation of the Member States' national Roma strategic frameworks
2 Feb 2024
On current form, the Strategic Framework is doomed to fail, and the blame lies squarely with Member States, especially those with the largest Roma populations, where weak governance, endemic corruption, and routine segregation have gone hand-in-hand with unabashed anti-Roma racism from the highest public offices. A synthesis report by the Roma Civil Monitor published in 2023, noted a major flaw in the available NRSFs as, the omission of the Romas most significant problems, including ineffective or exclusionary/discriminatory mainstream policies and services. The problem runs deeper than the inadequacy of the new batch of rehashed and revised strategies and action plans that made little difference since 2011. In those Member States with the largest Roma populations, weak governance, endemic corruption, and routine segregation have gone hand-in-hand with unabashed anti-Roma racism from the highest public offices. Key issues include: Police violence: The NRSF have little to day about the institutional racism in the justice systems and police violence against Roma. In 2023, the PACE Committee deplored the fact that violent raids and attacks against Roma villages and settlements as well as ethnic profiling, harassment, marginalisation and provocation, are part of daily life for many Roma and Travellers. The shooting dead by Greek police of three Romani teenagers in as many years provided stark and shocking reminders of the price of neglect. In a motion passed unanimously by the PACE Standing Committee, the parliamentarians stressed the systemic nature of this discrimination, which includes inhuman and degrading treatment, torture, excessive use of force, and violence resulting in some cases in the victims death. The whole process is doomed as long as justice for Roma is side-lined. School segregation: It is unacceptable that one of the minimum targets for 2030 is cutting the proportion of Romani children in segregated primary education by at least half in Member States with a significant Roma population. Over the past 20 years, dozens of rulings in regional and national courts, and a clutch of ECtHR judgments dating back to 2005, have ruled school segregation to be discriminatory and illegal. As the ERRC cautioned, this halfway approach to desegregation, has been taken as a signal to do nothing of any substance to desegregate the school systems. Infringement procedures brought through the RED have dragged on without progress for five years against Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia for school segregation. In its evaluation of the quality of the strategies, the Roma Civil Monitor found that the measures put forward by concerned Member States (BG, CZ, EL, ES, HU, IT, RO and SK) are not sufficient to address this issue systematically. 2030 targets for Romani children in all aspects of their lives must be as ambitious as those for every other child in the European Union. Romani children remain over represented in state care institutions: Many at-risk Romani families do not have access to social supports and preventative measures remain scarce, often non-existent. Underfunding combined with institutional discrimination results in removals of too many Romani children from their families. States must commit to closing down such institutions, and to provide a human rights-compliant response to this crisis of care, the total elimination of institutional care, and the development of appropriate child support services across Europe. This should be a priority for member states, and we call on them to revise their NRSF to make it so. Housing: Residential segregation is symptomatic of the wider issue of environmental racism faced by Roma across Europe, starkly evident in forced displacement and mass evictions to make way for gentrification, tourism or corporate development projects. Most countries just opted to map the situation, ignore the issue of forced evictions. This further dooms the Framework to failure.
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