An appeal
to the UN and the European Union to put an end to the anti-Roma measures being
carried out in Italy
Rome, January 13th, 2013
FROM EVERYONE GROUP
An urgent appeal to the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe,
the European Commission, and civil society
EveryOne Group is launching a dramatic appeal
for an end to the persecution of the Roma people in Italy. Since 2007 the Roma
in Italy have been subjected to thousands of evictions during which many abuses
have taken place, with the ill-treatment of men, women and children and forced
evictions without the offer of alternative housing.
The authorities have also
carried out expulsions due to "social dangerousness". There have been charges
and convictions for child exploitation, begging, occupying public land and other
crimes specially crafted to target the Roma people.
Hundreds of children have
been taken from their legitimate families for reasons of poverty, and put up for
adoption to Italian families (their parents often lose them because they have no
money and no home to undertake legal proceedings). Many Roma have died from
disease, the cold, accidents, fires, and violence from third parties. Many
babies have died in the womb after their mothers miscarried during evictions.
The mortality rate for Roma children is 15 times higher than that of Italian
children. In 2007, about 70,000 Romanian Roma were living in Italy. More than
20,000 received prison sentences. Many families have now fled to Spain, France,
Greece and other European Union nations to escape this persecution. Many others
have returned to Romania. EveryOne Group has assisted many families with its own
resources, both in Italy and when they have sought refuge in a different country
or returned to their home country.
The Geneva Convention does not protect
persecuted Roma families in a EU Member State when they move to another country,
one of many serious violations of the right to asylum that is now
institutionalized.
For our part, we have worked with the European Parliament and
the Council of Europe in the drafting of directives and resolutions,
particularly when the MEPs Viktoria Mohacsi and Els De Groen were defending the
Roma people. Now that these two MEPs, and the MEPs of the Italian Radical Party
are no longer in the European Parliament, the European policies on the Roma have
become cut off from reality, they are ineffective, and far from the reality of
the human rights defenders and the Roma themselves.
At the present all our
appeals are falling on deaf ears and the information that we pass on to
international institutions are merely included in reports and are not followed
up by actions in support of the Roma people.
The co-presidents of EveryOne Group
themselves have suffered severe political and judicial harassment, including
eight criminal charges brought by the Italian authorities with the risk of long
prison sentences (for slander, libel, interruption of public service, etc.)
Only
after intervention from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,
the European Commission, FrontLine Defenders, Avocats sans Frontières and dozens
of organizations for the rights of Roma people all over the world were the
activists of EveryOne Group acquitted.
However, these criminal proceedings have
been very costly and they have been forced to change cities often to prevent
fresh attacks from the institutions and racist movements.
The EveryOne Group
activists have also been subjected to serious measures by police headquarters;
they have been followed and summoned to talks with the authorities on the
strangest of pretexts. They have also received threats, intimidation and
physical assaults. They have been followed by anonymous persons, blacklisted in
neo-Nazi and racist lists, and have received media and cultural censorship (in
that the activists of EveryOne are also writers and artists).
However, the
members of EveryOne Group have remained at the side of the Roma people,
defending them with their own resources - the organization is self-financing -
and are committed to fighting a daily battle against a persecution that is
getting worse by the day, without any protection from the international
authorities.
Currently only 6-7,000 Romanian Roma remain in Italy. They are
broken up into small communities that the police evacuate in continuation,
arriving at dawn in order to ensure that Italian citizens do not witness such
unjust and cruel actions. Families are treated as "asocial gangs" and a security
problem, just as they were before and during the Holocaust. They receive heavy
fines, complaints are filed against them and they are subjected to numerous
evictions.
Children are still being taken from their parents because they live
in poverty and hardship. Most families are now leaving their children in Romania
to prevent the police, social services and the juvenile court taking them off
them.
Many parents have been sentenced to many years imprisonment for "slavery":
an accusation founded on prejudices that punish those in need, measures that
affect families who stick together even during the extreme and humiliating
activity of begging, an activity they are forced to undertake in order to
survive poverty and marginalization.
EveryOne Group is
calling on the United Nations and the European institutions not to close their
eyes, appealing to them to acknowledge the severity of the persecution that
affects the Roma and the human rights defenders in Italy.
This is a serious
problem that involves the media (in Italy newspapers receive significant
government funding and therefore are at the service of the different powers);
the political parties (which attack the Roma people, using slanderous
accusations to win electoral consensus); the Mafia (which uses the Roma to
divert public attention from its own crimes and dirty money, which in 2012
amounted to 200 billion Euro) and the racist movements, which in Italy are
getting stronger and more influential all the time without the institutional
bodies doing anything to put a stop to them.
Today the "anti-Roma machine" is
very strong and only a few human rights defenders are able to hold out against
the persecution of activists. We have seen, in our talks with humanitarian
organizations in France, that Italy (with its policies of ethnic hatred that are
tolerated by the UN and the EU) has become a bad example for the French
institutions who are now following Italy’s tragic example.
While we write, new evictions and fresh
anti-Romani measures have just been carried out, causing death, pain and
marginalization: in Rome, in the abandoned buildings of Colle degli Abeti, in
Via Sfondrati and Via Piolti de' Bianchi; in Turin, at Lungo Stura Lazio; in
Civitanova Marche, against a family living in serious humanitarian conditions;
in Milan, along the railway lines(while the dismantling of the Roma camp in Via
Malaga had already been announced); in Via Maceri in Forlì; in Via Fucile in
Torre Annunziata (Naples); in Genoa-Cornigliano and in many other places.
EveryOne Group is asking the authorities this letter is addressed to not to
ignore our appeal and to implement, according to their functions, appropriate
and binding measures and actions of civilty aimed at stemming the institutional
hatred that the Roma in Italy are being subjected to.
Acts of
persecution that put them through an unbearable ordeal, lowering both the life
expectancy of Roma children and the longevity of people who belong to this
ethnic group (currently only 40/45 years in Italy), and denying these people who
are already the victims of poverty and intolerance the right to employment,
health, a home and their dignity as human beings.
EveryOne Group is also
appealing to the institutions to intervene and put an end to the repression of
activists and cultural workers who work for an end to racism, while promoting a
politics and culture founded on tolerance.
For EveryOne Group, the human rights defenders
Roberto Malini, Dario Picciau, Glenys Robinson, Morena La Rosa, Steed Gamero,
Ipat Ciuraru, Daniela Malini, Laura Louise Stirner
The photograph, taken by EveryOne Group during
an eviction in Pesaro in 2008, shows a young pregnant Roma woman called Veta,
after she fell to the ground, terrified by the eviction operations being carried
out by a large group of armed officers. After the police action she suffered a
miscarriage. Mihai, the older man on the right, later died of ill health and
starvation on the bus from Pesaro to Bucharest; the other Roma were forced, with
help from EveryOne Group, to take refuge in “safer” cities and nations in order
to escape the removal of all of their children by the authorities.
Nina Simone sings a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. three days after his murder.
Poem for MLK Day
PLEASE ENJOY THIS PERFORMANCE BY ROBY LAKATOS
PROTECTING ROMA REFUGEES: A UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE.jpg)
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