Yuseinova and others v Bulgaria (third-party intervention, 2019)

25 July 2019

Facts

The applicants were Romani families facing eviction from their homes in Plovdiv. They were living in solid brick homes connected to public utilities and those homes were where they had their official registered address. The authorities had known for years that the applicants were living there and even collected the relevant taxes on the properties. But the homes were built on municipal land without permission, and the authorities took steps to try to demolish those homes.

The ERRC’s Third-Party Intervention

A third-party intervention is a written submission that an NGO or someone else can make when they are not already involved in a case, to provide the European Court of Human Rights with information and arguments to help the Court make the right ruling. We asked for permission to intervene in this case and the Court granted us permission.

In our written submission, we insisted that the time had come for the European Court to use the term “antigypsyism” in its case law. The term was now widely used by intergovernmental institutions, including most recently by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, to describe the specific forms of discrimination Romani people and certain others face. We pointed out that the Court had at least nine cases pending before it concerning forced evictions of Roma. This concentration of cases was not a coincidence: forced evictions are one of the most visible manifestations of antigypsyism in Europe today, and Roma are increasingly fighting back in court. Centuries of exclusion and discrimination have left Roma among the poorest people in Europe. We provided data about Romani poverty and provided particularly detailed data about the deep poverty Roma face in Bulgaria. The difficult housing situation in which many Roma found themselves made forced evictions an attractive tool for public bodies and officials motivated by antigypsyism. We recalled an earlier submission we had made to the Court about forced evictions of Roma, describing evictions carried out contrary to the requirements of the Court’s case law in Albania, France, Hungary, Italy, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia. We then focused on Bulgaria, where political hate speech and forced evictions have been closely linked for several years. Politicians who have used anti-Roma hate speech are in powerful positions, and some recent evictions have been closely linked to elections and anti-Roma protests supported by political parties. Many Roma were still at risk of forced eviction, and the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe had found that Bulgaria has still not taken the necessary general measures to execute previous judgments about forced evictions. We argued that it would be a serious error for the Court to limit itself to a narrow consideration of the procedural failings of an eviction or to the failure to ensure alternative accommodation for those being evicted. The Court could not ignore the wider context of antigypsyism in which forced evictions of Roma were taking place.

In closing, we urged the Court to:

• use the term “antigypsyism” to describe the particular forms of discrimination Roma in Europe face today; 
• recognise that Romani poverty is a significant manifestation of antigypsyism; 
• recognise that Romani people often live in informal housing as a result of this poverty, leaving them vulnerable to forced evictions; and 
• recognise, particularly in Bulgaria, that forced evictions are closely linked to political hate speech and racialised politics, and are therefore a manifestation of antigypsyism. 

This approach pointed to a finding of a violation of Article 8 taken with Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provided the only chance that appropriate general measures would be taken.

The Court’s Decision

On 4 June 2019, the European Court of Human Rights dismissed the case by delivering an inadmissibility decision. 

During the course of the proceedings, all but one of the applicants withdrew their complaints. It is not clear why they did this, although their representative claimed it was a result of undue pressure from the authorities. The Court, however, found that these applicants had withdrawn their applications and that respect for human rights did not require the Court to continue examining the cases.

As for the remaining applicant, the Court found that he had submitted his application more than six months after the last remedy he had exhausted. There is a six-month time limit for bringing applications to the Court, so that made the application out of time.

This is how the Court summarised our third-party intervention: “The European Roma Rights Centre submitted that forced evictions were one of the most visible manifestations of ‘antigypsyism’, this term being used to describe the specific forms of discrimination which the Roma community faces. There were at least nine cases pending before the Court which concerned forced evictions of Roma in different Council of Europe member States. This was not a coincidence. Rather, the difficult housing situation which many Roma face, compounded with the sub-standard living conditions and poverty typical for the majority of Roma people, made forced evictions an attractive tool for public bodies and officials motivated by antigypsyism. The organisation urged the Court to recognise that, particularly in Bulgaria, forced evictions were linked to political hate speech and racialised politics. Specifically, evictions frequently followed protests against the Roma, which had been prompted at the origin by political agendas of hostile political parties”.

The European Court’s inadmissibility decision in the case can be found here. 

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