Forgotten Futures: Romani Children in State Care in Bulgaria

30 October 2024

This report was published in cooperation with the Equal Opportunities Initiative in Bulgaria and builds upon decades of ERRC research, legal work, and activism aimed at ending the discrimination of Romani families in the state care systems of Europe. The research exposes the mechanisms by which Roma are disproportionately placed in state care because of the racialized poverty of their families, embedded racial biases in the care sector, and multiple failures to provide alternatives to family removals and segregated institutions in Bulgaria.

Through legal analysis, synthesis desk research, interviews with professionals in the care system, and surveys of Romani communities the report elucidates a system that is broken by failures of policy, chronic underfunding, and widespread institutional racism. It not only maps the human rights issues within the care sector but stands as a stark call for major reform at multiple levels to ensure that no child, regardless of ethnicity, has to grow up in an institution without a family.

The report Forgotten Futures: Romani Children in State Care in Bulgaria can be downloaded here in English and Bulgarian.