France’s policy toward the Roma community is once again slammed by an international organization, as well as racism targeting other minority groups.
The French government defended its policy of demolishing Roma camps Wednesday before a special U.N. panel, which denounced discrimination against Romas and trivialization of “hate speech” in the country. The 18 members of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination grounded its accusations on the situation observed in the country over the five past years – as its last assessment on racism in France was in 2010. “There was an impression that freedom of expression enabled hate speech by the politicians,” the report stated, later encouraging authorities to reinforce criminalization of hate speech on Internet, among other measures. It also noticed several cases of state discrimination against ethnic minorities, especially the Roma one: “Concerns were raised about the treatment of Roma and Traveller communities, explicit discrimination against Muslims, and the situation of indigenous peoples in overseas territories, including the violations of the rights of Kanaks in New Caledonia, the denial of access to natural resources to indigenous peoples in French Guyana, and the stripping of a great number of Mahorais in Mayotte of their fundamental rights. Experts inquired about measures to promote the situation of disadvantaged members of the society, to improve the situation of migrants and asylum seekers in the country, and to protect juveniles seeking to reach the country.” Continue reading UN Accuses France of Racism Against Romas
Category Archives: Posts in English
Ukraine: Roma in Transcarpathia fear hunger, mobilization and the police
News server Romea.cz has interviewed Romani studies scholar Michael Beníšek about the everyday life of Romani people in the Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod and its environs, their concerns, identity and language, their relationship toward the gadje, their love of Bollywood films and the new wave of Romani refugees from Transcarpathia now entering Britain with Hungarian passports. Beníšek studied Indology and Romani Studies at the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University in Prague, where he then remained at the Romani Studies Seminar as an educator.
Currently Beníšek is working on his doctoral dissertation on the dialects of North Central Romani that are spoken in Transcarpathian Ukraine. He has traveled regularly to visit Romani communities in Uzhhorod and its environs since 2007, and in 2011 became the godfather of a boy from a Romani family with whom he established closer contact and whom he travels to visit several times a year.
Q: You’ve just returned from Uzhhorod. How are Romani people in the Transcarpathian region of Western Ukraine living, what is currently worrying them most? Continue reading Ukraine: Roma in Transcarpathia fear hunger, mobilization and the police
Shocking video shows Slovakian police officers forcing Romani children to strip naked and fight each other after they were arrest for robbing an elderly woman
Video shows the children being forced to fight and then strip by officers
Came after the six boys were arrested for robbing an elderly woman
But as court won’t accept footage as evidence, police have been cleared
Judge ruled it was not admissible as video had been ‚illegally obtained‘
Prosecutor is seeking to appeal the verdict against the 10 officersA shocking new video has emerged showing police in Slovakia forcing Romani children to fight each other and strip naked after they were arrested on suspicion of robbing an elderly woman. The footage has appalled the country after it was also revealed that the officers involved will not face any punishment after a local court refused to accept the video as evidence. The images, that spread quickly online, show how 10 police officers had forced the young children to beat each other, strip and even lick a shoe, causing widespread public outrage. They video was shot in 2009 by the officers themselves at a police station in the city of Kosice and had been shared among the police before it leaked on to the internet.
The case was eventually brought to court this week for a verdict after numerous delays. But all 10 officers were acquitted because the judge said the video had been ‚illegally obtained‘ and was therefore not admissible in court. The prosecutor, for whom the video evidence was the strongest asset, will appeal the verdict as without it there was little other evidence. However, the judge defended the decision, pointing to contradictory statements in the evidence given by the children. After the incident nine police officers lost their jobs and criminal proceedings were announced, but after throwing out the charges of assault, blackmail and trying to cover it up, the judge ordered a not guilty verdict because ‚there was no relevant evidence‘.
Attorney for the victims Vanda Durbakova, from the Slovak Centre for Civil and Human Rights, said: ‚The decision of the court is a genuine disappointment to me. ‚It seems that Slovak justice is unable to guarantee an effective access to justice even in the most prominent, unambiguous cases of cruel and inhuman treatment in our society. ‚The courts have been unable to effectively protect citizens from serious misconduct by units of state repression such as the police, which I consider alarming. ‚I believe the appeals court will overturn this decision on the basis of the prosecutor’s appeal and that the victims will not ultimately have to go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to get justice.‘
The Slovak Government Plenipotentiary for Romani Community Affairs, Peter Pollak, added: ‚I have personally seen the video footage from this case. ‚The police bullied those boys, which is why I appreciate the fact that the prosecutor will appeal this verdict. I condemn such practices. We must judge everyone by the same standards, and I condemn all criminal activity, whether it is committed by a police officer or a Romani person.‘
Source: Daily Mail
Date: 06.03.2015
Slovakia: Riot unit attack on Romani settlement remains unsolved
One year on from initiating a criminal prosecution in the case of an attack on the Budulovská Romani settlement in the town of Moldava nad Bodvou by police riot units, Slovak justice authorities have not managed to complete their investigation.The European Roma Rights Centre and the Equity civic association have issued a press release on Facebook to that effect.
The press release recalls that criminal reports filed against the officers have since been mysteriously lost by the Prosecutor-General. Detectives are now said to be arranging for psychological examinations of those who witnessed the attack, which seems more like an effort to call their testimonies into question than an effort to discover and punish the perpetrators of the incident.
Slovak ombud Jana Dubovcová said previously that she considers the investigation to be a kind of „camouflage“. She has now announced that she will be reviewing whether the delays in the case are unnecessary.
The police intervention in the Budulovská settlement happened in June 2013. Local residents say the settlement was occupied by 20 police vehicles and that approximately 60 officers in balaclavas broke into their homes, demolished their fixtures and assaulted them. Continue reading Slovakia: Riot unit attack on Romani settlement remains unsolved
Two Survivors of the Roma Genocide Share Their Stories
Between 1933 and 1945, Roma across German-occupied Europe were subjected to arbitrary confinement, forced labor, and mass killing. As many as 500,000 men, women, and children were murdered. On the 70th anniversary of the largest mass killing of Roma, on August 2, 1944, hundreds gathered at a commemoration event in Krakow and Auschwitz. I spoke with two Roma Genocide survivors, József Forgács and Rita Prigmore.
József Forgács“My mother, father, and I were collected from our town in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary. I was only nine years old,” recalled 79-year-old József Forgács, a Roma Genocide survivor. “We were taken by train to Komárom. The train ride was a humiliating experience: crowded and cold, men and women all together with no toilet and almost no food.”
Forgács recounted his memories of deportation from Hungary and his time at a forced labor camp in Austria, where he spent eight months as a child. Continue reading Two Survivors of the Roma Genocide Share Their Stories
Former Czech Foreign Minister does not believe his father was involved with the Lety camp
Former Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg does not believe his father was involved at all in the establishment of the WWII-era camp at Lety by Písek. Radio Wave reports that Schwarzenberg made the statement in response to claims by Paul Polansky that Schwarzenberg’s father needed a cheap labor force in 1939 to clean up after a large blizzard and asked authorities to build a labor camp for that purpose.
„In December 1939, that entire region was affected by the biggest blizzard that locals had ever experienced. Karel Schwarzenberg, not the current one, but his father, owned 10 000 hectares of forest and a large portion of it was destroyed. It was a catastrophe for him. He needed a cheap labor force to process the wood as quickly as possible, otherwise he would have gone bankrupt. He asked the authorites to build the labor camp. However, he was far from the only person to take advantage of slave labor. In the archives, and in my interviews with survivors, I have discovered that Schwarzenberg also brought Jews from Mirovice, where the biggest Jewish community was, as slaves to Lety and did his best to save them by doing so. That was at the beginning of 1940. However, all of those people were professors, business people, lawyers, teachers, they didn’t know how to do manual labor. Schwarzenberg saw that it wasn’t going to work. They were all sent to Terezín and replaced with Gypsies, who knew how to do manual labor. They did not work for him only in the forest, but also in a nearby quarry, so from 1940 to December 1942, he exploited first a Jewish and then a Gypsy labor force on his land as slaves,“ Polansky said in an interview with Radio Wave on 30 December 2014.
Polansky referred to personal interviews he claims to have conducted with many forest workers or local farmers who allegedly saw the Jewish workers and spoke with them in the forest at the time. „Look, I was two years old then. I’d have to look at the documentation like anyone else. However, I do not believe it’s true,“ Radio Wave reports that Karel Schwarzenberg has now said in response to Polansky’s claims. „He claims to have spoken with my father’s former employees, but please, they had all long been in heaven by the time Polansky came to Bohemia. I would really like to know who pitched this to him,“ Schwarzenberg said, emphasizing that, „When I returned to the Czech Republic, I attempted to find all of the former employees. One gamekeeper was already bedridden and otherwise everyone else was dead. I would like to know who he actually spoke with, who this responsible employee was.“ Continue reading Former Czech Foreign Minister does not believe his father was involved with the Lety camp
Serbian Police Hunt Anti-Roma Campaigners
Serbian police are searching for the authors of leaflets which were distributed across the country, calling for violence against Roma people.
The interior ministry said on Monday that it was trying to identify the people behind the little-known organisation called Srbska Akcija that distributed the anti-Roma flyers across Serbia over the weekend. “Police in cooperation with the prosecutor’s office are working intensively on the detection and identification of the persons that created and distributed flyers which openly call for violence, lynching and hate speech against Roma,” the ministry stated. The flyers, which urge people to stop “the spread of wild gipsy settlements” that bring “arguments, fights and the rise of crime”, appeared in mailboxes in Belgrade and several other cities. Nevena Petrusic, the Serbian Commissioner for Protection of Equality, has filed criminal charges against the people who created the leaflets. “The state is obliged to protect the freedom and security of all its citizens, to prevent threats, violence and hatred toward national and any other minorities,” said Petrusic, adding that the state must send a clear message that Serbia will not tolerate racism. Meho Omerovic, the head of parliamentary committee for human and minority rights, said that the leaflets were “fascism in action” and must be taken seriously. “Today it’s Roma who are to be blamed for everything, tomorrow it will be LGBT and all others that are different. That is how evil starts – with leaflets and hate speech that are followed by violence and murders,” Omerovic wrote in a statement. He announced that he will urged parliament to adopt an emergency declaration against violence and hate speech. “If we do not see that it’s fascism in action, then we have accepted that it is allowed and we are all accomplices in this open call to lynch,” he said. The NGO Anti-Fascist Action said that the leaflets contain “the most primitive form of fascist propaganda urging violence against Roma, which are marked as the cause of poverty in which most citizens of Serbia live”. “It is a basic fascist doctrine of distraction from the real causes of the economic situation. Just as Hitler in Germany invented that the Jews were the cause of the economic crisis to draw attention from the real culprits – the big capitalists – today domestic fascists point at Roma,” Anti-Fascist Action said in a statement. It said that “fortunately, people are not so blind and naive to believe that the most vulnerable ethnic groups in society, 99 per cent of whose members live in absolute poverty, below the minimum level of human dignity” are responsible for the economic situation in Serbia.
Source: Balkan Insight
Date: 01.12.2014
Slovak Plan To Give Gypsies Free Flights To UK
A group of local Slovak politicians who wear cowboy hats and call themselves the magnificent seven are campaigning on a promise to solve crime and clean up the area by putting gypsies on flights to the rest of Europe, and sterilising those that remain.
Vladimir Guertler, 41, who is head of the Magnificent Seven Party that promises to restore law and order by getting rid of the gypsies with one-way tickets abroad, has backed up his plan with TV spots interviewing gypsies admitting they would welcome the chance of a free ticket out of the country.
Those that remain, he said, would be eligible for free sterilisation operations for which they would get incentives, including the advantage that with fewer children they would have more money for other things.Before the region split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, Czechoslovakia routinely sterilised Roma women to curb the birthrate of people regarded as „undesirables“ but it was thought to have ceased after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. It was later found out however that doctors had continued the practice not just for months but for years.And now the subject has been raised again in Slovakia together with the idea of encouraging Roma to go to other places in Europe with free one-way tickets. The „7 statocnych“ party, which means the magnificent seven, is campaigning in the city of Kosice in the impoverished east of Slovakia, a region split by ethnic tension. Continue reading Slovak Plan To Give Gypsies Free Flights To UK
Romani transgender woman murdered in Istanbul home
A transgender Romani woman has been found by police, killed at her home in the neighborhood of Kurtuluş on the European side of Istanbul, news website Bianet reported on Oct. 10. The circumstances of the murder are unclear, with police officials saying they are unable to establish whether there had been a robbery at the address. Relatives of the woman, known as “Gypsie Gül,” told Bianet that most murders of transgender people who earn their living through prostitution are usually committed by their clients. However, they also added that Gül did not bring her clients to her home but usually went to hotels.
Gül’s body was found by a friend who was concerned after not receiving news from her for two days. Kurtuluş, in the central Şişli district of Istanbul, is one of the most tolerant neighborhoods in the city, where many transgender people have chosen to settle and live. Many transgender people in Turkey live under constant threat of hate attacks and most of the murders targeting the LGBT community are left unsolved. A young transgender woman, Çağla Joker, was murdered last April following an attack by two young men.
Source: Hürriyet Daily News
Date: 10.10.2014
Czech Roma Under the Swastika
Seventy years ago Czech and Slovak Roma embarked on a grim path to nearly complete annihilation. In the spring and summer of 1943, 4,500 Roma were shipped off to the so-called Gypsy camp in Auschwitz: one-third were from camps in Lety and Hodonin, in the south and southwest of the country, and two-thirds were taken from their homes. The fates of local Roma remain one of the least investigated chapters of the war, and one part of this story is completely unknown – that some Roma survived the Nazi attempt at extermination thanks to the help of “white people.”
THE TRAIN THAT LEFT
Even after decades 87-year-old Emilie Machalkova’s voice shakes and tears fill her eyes when she recalls those scenes. The spring sun was not yet very warm when one Monday afternoon she stood, a 16-year-old girl, at the railway station in Nesovice, a village 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Brno. She, her parents, two brothers, grandmother, and 3-year-old cousin were waiting for a train to take them to the stables of the protectorate police in Masna Street in Brno, where they had been told to report. Nearly all their neighbors accompanied them to the station, Machalkova recalls: all her childhood friends and family friends came. Someone brought a traditional Czech pork dish, others bread. “All of us were crying a lot because we thought that we wouldn’t come back.” Continue reading Czech Roma Under the Swastika