The ERRC is Ten Years Old

05 April 2006

The European Roma Rights Centre Celebrates its Tenth Birthday

Budapest. The European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) today celebrates its tenth anniversary at an event hosted by the Budapest embassy of the United Kingdom, and by Budapest Mayor Gabor Demszky.

On the occasion of the ERRC's tenth anniversary, UK Ambassador to Hungary Mr. John Nichols said, "The British government has been a proud sponsor of ERRC activities, including its work in Russia, its anti-discrimination legal work in southeastern Europe, its production and distribution of a human rights training manual for Romani activists, and its efforts in the field of housing rights in Hungary and Slovakia. We believe the ERRC has been an exemplary force for good."

Budapest Mayor Gabor Demszky commented, "The ERRC has helped make Budapest an important regional centre. We are proud to have been a home to this important international initiative during its first decade."

The ERRC was founded in 1996 and opened offices in January of that year. During 1996, the ERRC issued its first publications – Country Reports on Austria, Romania and Slovakia. By the end of the year, the ERRC had established its Legal Program. In 1997, the ERRC began its first Human Rights Education activities, and by 1998 it had formalized its International Advocacy work.

Ten years ago, there was no "Roma rights" – now this is a rich field of human rights advocacy, as well as an aspect of the Roma movement. The ERRC has been the conceptualizer of Roma grievances, the translator of these grievances into the powerful language of international human rights, and the framer of issues in the struggle to empower Roma. Today, although there are important other institutions involved in Roma rights, ERRC remains a busy laboratory that continues to produce strategic tools for the Roma rights movement. The service ERRC has provided to society is that it put human rights and Roma issues in one house. And by doing this, it has made a difference in both.

Ten years ago there were only a handful of lawsuits – first in Bulgaria and then in Hungary – in which Roma had claimed their rights in court. In 1996, ERRC started building its litigation program, on an almost empty space. Roma were at that time too weak to defend their rights in the courts, and the legal, political and social ingredients for public interest law were still missing in the region. Today, Roma have prevailed in court in hundreds of cases.

Though many organizations take on cases today, the ERRC remains to date the biggest and most successful litigator on behalf of Roma, and also perhaps on behalf of any minority in Europe. In the course of its short lifetime the ERRC has been involved, with Romani plaintiffs, in over 500 cases, of which over 300 have been completed. Of these, over 225 have been won or otherwise settled positively. The ERRC has prevailed in 22 cases in international jurisdictions, including 15 cases won before European Court of Human Rights. Some of these victories have been trailblazing, and many go beyond established jurisprudence, as well as beyond solely bringing just satisfaction to individual Roma. In seeking to end the impunity of perpetrators of these extreme harms and to bring justice to victims and surviving members of their families, we have taken on some of the most extreme cases in Europe:

• The Hadareni pogrom, in which ethnic Hungarian and ethnic Romanian villagers in Romania tortured to death three men accused of a local killing, while police looked on;
• The killing of Mario Goral – doused in gasoline by skinheads and burned to death in Slovakia;
• The massive pogrom at Danilovgrad, Montenegro;
• The case of Anguel Zabchikov, killed in police custody in Bulgaria; … to name only a few.

The current open case load of the ERRC includes 179 cases.

The ERRC has played a significant role in advancing the implementation of anti-discrimination law in Europe. Beginning in 2000 with the adoption of several standard setting European legal instruments, we have engaged in advocating comprehensive anti-discrimination law and policy as a core aspect of our work. Several countries have adopted excellent legislation that we are now in the process of testing to see implemented. Others have yet to bring comprehensive anti-discrimination law into the domestic legal order. We plan to keep working on these fronts in our second decade.

The ERRC has developed the largest and most authoritative information resources on Roma rights, including in electronic formats. In its ten-year existence, the ERRC has issued more than 580 publications, including:

• 32 issues of the Roma Rights quarterly
• More than 20 comprehensive reports in 16 languages
• More than 500 press releases
• A comprehensive training manual in 6 languages

The ERRC has played a role not only in establishing Roma rights as a priority for human rights in Europe but also in the area of social policy development. We have helped articulate directions for rights-based policies in the sectors critical for Roma inclusion, including education, healthcare, housing, and employment. Perhaps the single most important issue we have addressed through research, advocacy, litigation and training -- is the issue of school segregation. And perhaps the single most important priority for the ERRC in the next years will be the struggle for desegregation. We are currently in the process of reviewing our own role in this area, looking in particular at the need to adopt legislation creating positive obligations to desegregate.

The ERRC has been a school for Romani activists. The majority of the younger generation of Roma who are active today in both governmental and non-governmental settings have passed through the ERRC as Board members, staff, interns, scholarship recipients, local monitors, participants in joint projects, partners, and/or volunteers. Over one thousand Roma have benefited from ERRC training programs – as interns, externs, scholarship recipients, or as a result of their participation in training workshops.

There are many challenges ahead for the ERRC's second decade. It is more difficult today than 10 years ago to play a strategic role in an increasingly complex human rights environment, and in an increasingly complex Roma movement. Work on legal cases generates a range of new obstacles. Equality of rights in practice for the Roma is still a far away destination.

In some places, the tasks ahead are daunting. A few days ago, a prominent human rights advocate in Russia, the 58-year-old Boris Krendel, the leader of the major human rights group in Tomsk, Siberia, was forced to go into hiding together with his young daughter, when the city was flooded with leaflets telling the citizens of Tomsk that it is intolerable to live in the same city with a man helping the Gypsies. His assistance to Roma comprises, as a member of an ERRC partner organization, filing a case challenging the impunity of powerful criminal gangs who burned to the ground the Romani settlement in the town of Iskitim. A 7-year-old girl died in the fire.