The ERRC, as well as many others, have been reporting racial assaults often resulting in deaths and injuries; invasions into private homes by armed police; looting, burning and evictions, sometimes of whole Romani communities; and constant problems in acquiring or maintaining citizenship and residence. Very few people have expressed sympathy or solidarity with the Roma. Officials at home have announced that they are to blame for their own misfortune. Asylum authorities, backed by politicians in the democratic West, have declared them to be economic migrants. Panicked by several hundred Romani applicants, European countries have tightened their immigration laws to prevent what the British press once called the "Gypsy invasion". Roma have ...

A major preoccupation of the ERRC is litigation in defense of Roma rights. But, people might ask, are all Roma rights cases also public interest law cases? The Assenov case was innovative from a purely legal point of view, regardless of the fact that Assenov is of Romani origin: it set a procedural guarantee of the right under Article 3. The court stated that "where an individual raised an arguable claim that he had been seriously ill-treated by agents of the State unlawfully and in breach of Article 3, that provision, read in conjunction with the State's general duty under Article 1 of the Convention to "secure to everyone within their jurisdiction the rights and freedoms in [the] Convention", required by implication that there should be ...

The most outrageous form of denial of the educational rights of Roma is, ironically, typical of the comparatively successful new democracies, the Czech Republic and Hungary. In these and some other countries, Romani children are streamed to so called "special schools", or "special classes". What is special about them is that they are designed as substandard educational programs for kids with developmental or mental disability. Rather than compensating alleged disability and integrating allegedly handicapped youths, they are a sure and final departure from equal opportunities, an unmistakable stigma for all who have been once referred to them. The fact is that Romani children are hugely over-represented and in some places make up to 95 ...

Racially motivated civilian violence against Roma is the focus of this issue. It comes in various forms, from skinhead assaults to mob law, and leaves behind death, handicap, and pain, physical as well as mental. Competing with police violence in scope, intensity and impunity, civilian violence against Roma has been documented since 1989 in most post-communist countries of Europe: Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

In fighting police brutality, we have relied upon two methods. First of all, we have collected and disseminated information about violations of Roma rights by police. We have described the most disturbing cases of abuse in our reports. Secondly, we have sued police officers and institutions and have assisted others in doing the same; in the best of cases (and more such cases will likely come), law enforcement officials were sent to prison. Now that these two methods have been usefully explored, we look forward to a third method: dialogue. Once the Roma and the lawyers have begun to form an alliance, it is time to invite to the table the missing party: the police. We are prepared to start a discussion, a genuine dialogue, with the police. ...

The ERRC acts to promote better understanding of specific problems with which Romani people in various social and cultural environments are faced. We insist that the Roma are endowed with universal human rights and have to be respected and treated equally without discrimination. The ERRC seeks to advance the rights and freedoms of the Romani people not because they may contribute in an exotic way Co European cultures, nor because they may be skilled musicians or story-tellers, but because they are bearers of the universal potential of development as human beings, born equal and free, but denied equality and freedom in today's Europe.

The memory of the Romani Holocaust – i.e. the man-made end of the world for hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies - is being brought back to life in the Roma rights movement. The Romani Holocaust is the central theme of this issue. We present the official complaint filed by a group of Czech Romani and non-Romani citizens and demanding prosecution of a person who they believe shared the responsibility for the Romani genocide in 1942-1943. We also publish testimony by Roma people whose memories, however intimate, should inhabit a public space.