Spain: Guilty of shopping while Roma – intersectional discrimination, racist presumptions and wrongful conviction
22 March 2024
In December 2019, a 21-year-old Romani mother was accosted, falsely accused of theft, and detained by a private security guard in a Madrid shopping mall. She was then tried, convicted of a misdemeanour and fined, in a hasty process that she felt was unfair, unjust and damaged her dignity. Since then, Fundación Secretariado Gitano (FSG) has been fighting this case of intersectional racism.
Jenifer Muñoz Vázquez was paying for baby-food in a Carrefour supermarket inside the mall, when a private security guard took a toy, still packaged, from her baby’s stroller and accused her of theft, saying to his colleague, “they’re Roma, of course they are stealing”. The fact of the matter was that the toy had been given to them as a gift at the opening of another store in the mall days earlier.
The guards ignored the young mother’s explanation, ignored her pleas to call the toy store to verify her account, and forcibly detained her and her baby in a cold security room for more than ninety minutes until the police arrived. During that time, she was unable to feed or change the baby.
The police registered the complaint based solely on the guard’s testimony and completely ignored Jenifer’s account. She got a citation to appear before the courts the next day for a speedy trial (juicio rápido, a criminal procedure where minor crimes are tried, and legal representation is not compulsory).
The clerk from the toy store offered to testify on Jenifer’s behalf, and called the Carrefour security manager to confirm that he had given her the toy. Jenifer went to the police station to report that she had a witness for the trial. The officers told her to go tell it to the judge. The next day at the trial, the judge ignored her request to summon the witness. She was interrogated by the judge and public prosecutor, convicted of theft and fined €26.
Straight afterwards, she called Fundación Secretariado Gitano (FSG) for help. This case was considered strategic by FSG, as there is a generalised pattern of discrimination and harassment of Romani women in shopping areas in Spain, where they are widely presumed to be guilty of shoplifting. More than four years later, with all domestic remedies long exhausted by FSG, the case is now before the CEDAW committee. The ERRC has also submitted a third-party intervention.
In its domestic arguments, FSG maintained that Jenifer’s rights to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence, as well as the right not to be discriminated against were all violated, and that she was a victim of intersectional discrimination. In its submission to CEDAW, FSG accused the judge and prosecutor of failing to ensure her equal access to justice, and failing to act impartially by relying solely on the testimony of a private security guard to convict a Romani woman of a crime she did not commit.
In its third-party intervention, the ERRC recounted how Romani women are routinely discriminated against in access to public establishments, notably by security guards in access to retail facilities both on account of their ethnicity and gender. Year after year, FSG receives large number of complaints from Romani women who were being harassed and humiliated in supermarkets and shopping centres, closely followed and often searched by security guards: “On more than one occasion, while shopping, Romani women were asked to lift their blouses in front of everyone and if refused, the police would be called and they would be held for hours in the store, as reported by the International Rights Spain.”
These incidents constitute intersectional discrimination based on gender, race and class, and the ERRC stressed that it is of paramount importance that the CEDAW names the form of discrimination this Romani victim has suffered, acknowledge its complex, intersectional nature, and emphasise how this is particularly destructive of fundamental rights. As FSG put it: “The facts of the case of Jenifer Muñoz Vázquez are framed within a context in Spain of intersectional discrimination against Roma women in supermarkets and shopping centres. Jenifer wants recognition that her rights were violated and reparative measures to be taken … She wants that no Roma woman would ever face this situation again.”
