Szolcsán v Hungary (pending)
13 December 2019
Facts
The ERRC is representing a Romani child in Hungary who is studying in a segregated school. He is known as “the applicant” because we applied on his behalf to the European Court of Human Rights to complain that Hungary is violating his rights.
In the 2013-2014 school year, the applicant was attending a Roma-only State school in his village. It was well-known that the school was segregated, and the authorities had agreed to stop enrolling new students there as part of a desegregation programme. But in reality the school was still enrolling new pupils. There was no other State school in the village, only a Catholic school and a German-minority school.
The applicant’s mother wanted him to study at a non-segregated school. So with the help of an NGO they tried to enrol him in a school in another village nearby that is not racially segregated. That village refused to enrol him, stating that he did not live in the school’s catchment area. That is true, although schools in Hungary have the discretion to enrol a child from outside the catchment area. The applicant appealed his case all the way up to Hungary’s Supreme Court and to the Constitutional Court, arguing that the school should have exercised its discretion to enrol him, so that he could avoid being in a segregated school. But the national courts in Hungary refused his appeals.
The Case
So the ERRC is now representing him in a case before the European Court. We are arguing that the refusal to enrol the applicant in a non-segregated school is a violation of his right to be free from discrimination in education (Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights taken with Article 2 of Protocol no.1). On 9 October 2019 the European Court decided there was a case to answer, and published the case on its website, along with questions that the Hungarian Government will have to answer.
According to the timeframes the Court tries to follow, the case should be decided by October 2021. But cases before the European Court often cases take longer.
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