30/04/2014
FSG
The nearly ten million citizens of Roma origin in Europe, a large proportion of whom suffer situations of extreme poverty, exclusion and discrimination, will look to the European Parliament and Commission which emerge from the forthcoming elections (in which the Parliament will elect a President of the Commission for the first time) to guarantee their status as European citizens, along with effective equality of rights and opportunities.
In recent years, progress has been made in the development of a European framework of policies of inclusion and equal treatment for the Roma minority, and the Parliament has had a crucial role in this. However, we have seen very little real impact on the lives of Roma people. Even worse, we have seen Member States failing to comply with either the spirit or the letter of Treaties, Directives or even national legislation in this area, while the response of the European Union´s institutions to such failures has been feeble.
The Roma population does not feel sufficiently protected by the European Union´s institutions. Equal treatment is not guaranteed; the right to free movement of European citizens is not respected; families are criminalised and expelled from one State to another without the proper legal guarantees; institutional declarations damage the image of Roma people and incite discrimination and exclusion; and finally the commitments made by Member States in the National Roma Integration Strategies are not honored. At the same time, the populist and xenophobic discourse which is gaining ground in Europe is lending strength to anti-Gypsyism, racist attacks and hate speech.
For all these reasons, the Fundación Secretariado Gitano wishes to contribute with proposals to the European electoral debate, and also to gather and disseminate information about the positions of political parties on certain topics which are of interest to society as a whole, and to the Roma population in particular.
We ask political parties and their candidates to include and explain in their electoral manifestos and in the political debate their position with respect to Roma issues, because we believe these unresolved issues call into question the very principles and values upon which the European project is based.
Finally, the Fundación Secretariado Gitano calls for full participation in the European Parliamentary elections, to avoid a show of strength from those parties which embody exclusion, hatred, discrimination, racism and attacks on the principle of equality of rights for all.
