Fundación Secretariado Gitano

ECRI asks Spain for more measures to avoid school segregation and early dropout of Roma students
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• Equal treatment
• International
• National level

In its interim follow-up conclusions published today, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) regrets that Spain has not yet implemented two priority recommendations it issued in 2018 urging the country to set up a truly independent equality body and to step up action to quickly increase the proportion of Roma children completing compulsory education.

Whilst noting the slow progress by Spain in implementing these recommendations, ECRI acknowledges the obstacles to implement them in the context of the last two years, with two general elections in 2019 and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

ECRI welcomes that work is reportedly underway to improve the quality of a draft Act on Equality of Treatment against all Forms of Discrimination, which should serve as a legal basis for setting up a fully independent equality body with sufficient human and budgetary resources, but notes that no time schedule for its preparation or adoption has been announced yet. It also underlines that the Council for the Elimination of Racial and Ethnic Discrimination (CERED) still has very limited resources and is still not independent from the government.

With regard to the second priority recommendation, ECRI recognises that, in the context of the Spanish National Integration Strategy, some activities of the Operational Plan for the years 2018-2020 were aimed at promoting the education of Roma children and preventing such pupils from leaving school too early. The current government has included ending the segregation of Roma children and preventing pupils from leaving school before completing compulsory education among its objectives.

However, ECRI regrets that no concrete measures have been introduced yet to increase the proportion of Roma children completing obligatory schooling - nor any related funding announced - and that no new statistical data in this respect is available in order to assess the impact of the government´s policies since 2018 .

From the Fundación Secretariado Gitano we value positively that ECRI insists on two matters that we have been working on for years, the need for an Equal Treatment Law, which we hope will be approved shortly (and which includes that independent body that claims the ECRI), and the right to education, both in terms of ending school segregation, as well as the need for specific support for Roma students, so that they can complete compulsory education and continue secondary and higher studies. We hope that the Spanish Government will take these observations into account and launch specialized programs to end the serious problems of segregation and school failure, as we have demanded from the FSG on numerous occasions.

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