19/06/2018
Fundación Secretariado Gitano
Madrid, June 19, 2018. The statements made yesterday by Italy´s far-right new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, promising to take a census of the country’s Roma community and the removal of all non-Italian Roma, and regretting that they will have to keep Roma with Italian citizenship because they cannot expel them, are the highest expression of hate speech against Roma. We witness again within the European Union an outrageous episode were Roma people are the target, inciting hatred, fueling intolerance and divide society.
But, above all, they constitute a violation of fundamental rights, such as the fundamental right to Equality and Dignity, and therefore, we believe that the irresponsibility of some public officials, such as Salvini, must meet a rapid legal and political response. We have mechanisms and legal instruments in the European Union that condemn this type of declarations: in particular, Article 2 of the Treaty of Lisbon, or Articles 1 and 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, Directive 2000/43 / EC of June 29, 2000, implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin, and various resolutions of the European Parliament on this matter.
The European Union can not remain silent and inactive in the face of these serious declarations by the new Italian Interior Minister. The European Institutions must make use of the available mechanisms to penalize these declarations. We must defend the framework of fundamental rights that we have endowed ourselves with as European citizens.
Legal measures must be taken, but it is also essential that the representatives of the EU institutions publicly condemn this attack against the EU´s core values and the dignity of a part of their citizenship, the Roma ethnic minority. We hope to see a unanimous response from the European Parliament, which represents the EU´s citizens, defending the right to non-discrimination of Roma people with the same forcefulness with which other causes have been defended within the Parliament.
We appeal to the decency of the Italian democratic institutions and to that part of society that does not feel represented by this discriminatory discourse or by fascist politicians like Salvini. A mobilization of all sectors of Italian and European society is necessary and urgent. The fundamental rights of the Roma community are as legitimate as those of any other person.
From the Fundación Secretariado Gitano, as an entity that has been working for decades defending the right to non-discrimination of Roma people, assisting victims and filing complains before the courts, we call on the support of the European institutions, political parties and society to denounce this serious violation of rights. We trust that they will know how to maintain a line of action in defense of the rights of all people, also the Roma.
MADRID: 26th of JUNE, 11.00H AT THE ITALIAN EMBASSY, CALLE LAGASCA 98.
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