J.I. v Croatia (third-party intervention, pending)

06 March 2018

Facts

The case was brought by a Romani woman in Croatia complaining about the failure of the police to protect her against gender-based violence. Her father had been sentenced to eight years in prison for rape and incest against her. He was granted weekend leave from prison and began to threaten her. She sought protection from the police, and called the police when she ran into her father in public. The police did not help and, as the European Court has put it, “their attitude towards the applicant, as a Roma person, was dismissive”. The applicant brought various complaints, including to Croatia’s Constitutional Court, which were dismissed.

The ERRC’s Third-Party Intervention

We set out data showing that Romani girls and women in Europe fare worse on a number of measures than Romani men (who, in turn, fare worse than society as a whole). Romani girls and women are also more likely than non-Roma girls and women to be victims of human trafficking, domestic violence, forced marriage, or childhood marriage. We asked “why?”, noting that it is a common trope of antigypsyism to ascribe abuse against girls and women to “Roma culture” or “Roma tradition”. We said this was a dangerous stereotype that must be named and whose harms must be exposed. Discrimination by police and other police failures meant that Roma in general were often unlikely to report crimes against them; because of dangerous stereotypes about Roma culture, the situation was even worse for Romani girls and women who were victims of gender-based violence. In this environment, Romani girls and women facing gender-based violence experienced a specific kind of “intersectional” harm. We provided an overview of intersectionality theory in anti-discrimination law. We urged the Court to describe the harm that Romani girls and women face as intersectional when, for example, police refuse to protect them from gender-based violence and that refusal is related to race or ethnicity. When Romani girls and women who are victims of gender-based violence receive a poorer response from police and this poor response is related to their race or ethnicity, it is particularly destructive of fundamental rights because it makes the harm those girls and women face invisible, it silences them, and it makes it particularly unlikely that they and others like them will seek protection in the future.

The Court’s statement of facts can be found here.

The ERRC’s third-party intervention can be found here.