Amnesty International has just released a report stating that the EU is not doing enough to combat discrimination against the Roma across its member states. Here is a summary of the situation in just one state, Slovakia:
Public schools remain segregated into Roma and non-Roma classrooms, in spite of a 2012 court decision that ended overt segregation in the country. Far-right groups hold well-attended anti-Roma rallies calling for the Roma’s expulsion; Roma families are attacked by racist thugs. Roma women are abused by Slovak doctors; Roma adults face 70 percent unemployment, more than double the national average; local officials deride them as “unemployed parasites”; and in the past two years, eleven municipalities have erected walls to separate Roma ghettos from their white Slovak neighbors.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has issued a statement to mark the day:
Roma continue to face wide-ranging discrimination in access to education, employment, housing, and healthcare. In recent years, the global economic crisis slowed progress to address these challenges and led to growing anti-Roma rhetoric and, even more alarming, violence. The walling off of some Roma villages from neighboring areas and the eviction of entire communities of Roma families from their homes vividly illustrates their exclusion and isolation. We cannot ignore these deeply troubling developments. No country can meet 21st century challenges with a large segment of its population uneducated and excluded.
On a rather different note, Robert Rustem calls for a more positive celebration of Roma culture:
International Roma Day should be a celebration of the humanity of Roma people and their courage and fortitude in the face of a quite terrifying array of social and economic obstacles. Despite all that Roma communities endure, there is no hint of rebellion. The iron survival instinct and the indomitable spirit of the Roma people continue to serve them well – just as they have done over centuries, in times even darker than we know today.
Equally, International Roma Day is an opportunity to rally non-Roma people to the cause of fairness, freedom and equality. … Non-Roma people should be encouraged to accelerate that process and resist the slide towards mayhem signalled by rising ‘Roma-phobia. And they should be welcomed as allies in the just and defining struggle against the forces of hate.
So I’ll conclude with some more positive news, via Eva Balogh’s Hungarian Spectrum, of non-Roma working with Roma in order to improve their education and career prospects:
There is a village high school attended practically exclusively by Roma children in one of the poorest counties in northeastern Hungary. The education the children receive in this school is poor, and even if a few of the students make it to college they end up with teacher’s certificates or degrees not really useful in today’s economic climate. It is not clear from the article how it happened, but a department head of a good university–I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Corvinus University, which specializes in economics and business–found out about the plight of that village high school. And he came up with a plan. He got in touch with the principal of a Budapest “elite” high school and asked him whether the teachers in that school would be willing to volunteer their time to prepare promising students in the village high school for entrance examinations in subject matters necessary for admittance to the best universities in the country. A large number of the elite school’s teachers volunteered as did at least 25 students from the department where the idea of intensive mentoring was born. That means that about fifty people spend their weekends in the village mentoring promising students. The intensive weekend course will be followed by summer camp. The mentoring has already begun, and we will see whether it is more effective than the government efforts of the past.