Why We Take Forced Evictions to Court
03 February 2017
- “Forced evictions are not a Roma rights issue”
That was the prevailing belief at the ERRC about two years ago. Here are some of the reasons the ERRC refused to spend time or money on forced evictions:
- Evictions are about poverty, not about discrimination.
- It looks bad. To be more specific:
- We need stop making Roma look like victims, and instead focus on Roma who do things like fight to integrate their schools.
- Forced evictions pit Roma lawbreakers against landowners with property rights. (“What if someone decided to live in your garden”, someone who didn’t like our forced evictions work once told me. “I bet you’d call the police”.)
- We are making it look like Roma want to live in squalor.
- The worst evictions are happening in France and Italy, and that work distracts us from our focus on the countries where most Roma live.
- It’s reactive work; we must be strategic.
I call bullshit.
Poverty is about discrimination. Is it a coincidence that Roma are usually so poor? It just so happens that that they are living in tents or shacks on land where they have no right to be? (No right under property laws, that is.) No. This is what discrimination looks like for Roma. Roma living in abandoned buildings, or in makeshift homes on empty land: that is the filthy, frustrating, hopeless, and endless reality of anti-Gypsyism in a lot of places.
Roma facing eviction are motivated to find real solutions to their housing problems. They are ready to go to court to fight for their right to be treated with dignity. They want a real home, as a first step to a dignified life.
Let’s not pretend this is about the rights of landowners (who more often than not are municipalities or other public bodies). This is a battle against the state. Forced evictions are state officials’ most visible tool for controlling Romani populations.
Evictions physically compel Roma to play out racist stereotypes in front of news cameras. Racist officials want us to believe that Roma are rootless. Then they terrorise Roma with cops, dogs, and bulldozers, and force them out of their homes with only what they can carry, so the rest of society can watch them wandering around in shock, sitting by the side of the road, not knowing where to go. It’s anti-Gypsyism 101. (We contribute to it, by the way, when we use weird words like “settlement” and “camp” to describe where Roma are living.) If we don’t stand up to it, we make it very easy for racists to stage their worldview and sell it to the public.
Some of my colleagues might want to call bullshit back on me. I obeyed the no-evictions philosophy while it prevailed at the ERRC. But we have been under new Roma leadership for over a year, and one of the first things our Roma leadership did was reverse that approach. It was the right decision.
- Roma are not the Soldiers in Your Socialist Revolution
I call myself a lefty, but I reject the racist idea that some left-wing romantics have: that the emancipation of Roma will overturn Europe’s unfair economic systems. Fighting forced evictions of Roma will not kick-start a social housing revolution, secure squatters’ rights, or ending the chokehold absentee landlords have over renters in an unfair housing market. Roma are not the “thin end of the wedge”, or some least common denominator with nothing to lose. We are supporting Roma to emancipate themselves into society as it is, not as it will be.
So the point of challenging forced evictions of Roma is to expose and eliminate the historic, ongoing ways that society has left Roma living on the margins; to make visible, and make disappear, the role of the state in keeping Roma living in abandoned buildings, or in tents and shacks on the side of roads or out of sight and away from public services. The outcome needs to be Roma living where they want, with the same opportunities and restraints. That is hard to imagine, since housing is connected to so many other things, but this is only one entry point.
How do we fight that battle? Here are a few ideas for strategically litigating forced evictions that we are following now:
- Be strategically reactive. Yes, that’s a thing. Not all strategic cases are years-in-the-making, carefully choreographed set pieces. We seize opportunities, even messy ones. We have to look for opportunities to stop forced evictions that can draw attention to their injustice, but without exhausting ourselves by chasing the many forced evictions of Roma that happen all the time. We were strategically reactive in two ways in 2016.
- In Italy and Romania, we worked with Roma whom we were already supporting in litigation to challenge forced evictions before the European Court of Human Rights.
- In Macedonia, we supported a community after the eviction happened (once we learned about it), kicking off litigation in the European Court of Human Rights and before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. These cases are redefining the way the racists think about Roma.
- Be patient and persistent. This is hard for Romani litigants facing evictions, but crucial. Watch this video of a community in South Africa that successfully resisted eviction. They could have given up after their first loss. They must have lost faith in the legal system before they won. We are pushing forward evictions cases that other people see as lost causes. We filed applications against France last year about evictions that had happened months and, in one case, a year before; evictions that people had forgotten about. Those cases will probably take five years to make their way through the Court. When they do, they might come to nothing; or they might change housing policy for Roma dramatically. This is a long fight.
- Call racism what it is: racism. In law, this means calling it discrimination. Courts do not like to talk about discrimination. In our Macedonian case, for example, the European Court has so far completely ignored our arguments about discrimination. We have to make the connection clearly: forced evictions are a form of racial harassment, which anti-discrimination laws prohibit. That may mean that the European Court of Human Right is not the best place to take these cases; we also have to go to domestic courts and rely on national anti-discrimination laws to make our point.
- Mobilise communities. We are still working on this. Romani communities facing eviction have been driven to desperation. Their biggest worry might be food or medicine, not holding a protest. We have to figure out how to support people who may be fighting for their rights, and their health, their pride, and their sense of self.
So, are we wasting our time on these cases? Let me know what you think, below or by email.
