HOME | INFO | >> NEWS | DOSSIER| BACHECA / TERMINE |
EDICOLA / KIOSK | LADINBolzano / Bozen, 22 december 2004
The European Committee
of Social Rights has this week ruled admissible a Collective
Complaint against Italy, lodged by the European Roma Rights
Center, contending that by policy and practice, Italy racially
segregates Roma in the field of housing. The Committee will
proceed to review, in early 2005, Italian housing policies as
they relate to Roma, to determine whether they comply with
Italy's obligations under the Revised European Social
Charter.
Housing arrangements for Roma in Italy aim at separating Roma
from the mainstream of Italian society and holding them in
artificial exclusion. As such, they block possibilities for
integration and subject Roma to the very serious harm of
segregation on racial grounds. In a number of Romani settlements
in Italy, very extremely inadequate housing conditions prevail,
threatening the health and even the lives of their Romani
inhabitants.
In addition, Italian authorities regularly and systematically
subject Roma to forced evictions from housing, calling seriously
into question Italy's compliance with a number of international
laws. During eviction raids, authorities arbitrarily destroy
property belonging to Roma, use abusive language, and otherwise
humiliate evictees. In many cases, persons expelled from housing
have been rendered homeless as a result of actions by police and
local authorities. In some instances, in the course of such
evictions, Roma have been collectively expelled from Italy. A
very significant part of Italy's Romani population lives under
constant threat of forced eviction.
The Collective Complaint, lodged in June 2004 by the ERRC,
working together with a number of local partners, is the result
of six years of documentation work undertaken by the ERRC into
the human rights situation of Roma in Italy. Speaking on the
occasion of the decision, ERRC Executive Director Dimitrina
Petrova said, "Our work on Italy has been constantly thwarted by
an institutional environment totally impervious to human rights
change. We turned to the Committee because despite repeated
challenges to racist housing policies, the Italian government has
failed utterly to undertake any meaningful changes."
The Society for threatened peoples (STP) supports the
denunciation carried out from the ERRC and sentence without
appeal the situation of discrimination in which Sinti and Roma in
Italy live. The STP asks moreover that Italy could arrive finally
to the acknowledgment of Sinti and Roma as ethnic minorities,
what that would facilitate an integration respectful of the
cultural specificities of the two ethnic groups.