Oproep Europees Parlement voor gecoördineerd beleid Roma-zigeuners (en)

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The EU should unite its policies towards Roma citizens, a new forum in the European Parliament proposed on Tuesday (25 January).

"We need to move beyond declarations and to create a coordinated framework for actions that improve the economic status and social inclusion of the Roma population", said Socialist MEP Katalin Levai, who opened the first meeting of the forum held in the European Parliament.

Other participants pointed out that despite huge sums pouring into EU projects for the Roma, the biggest ethnic minority in Europe remains segregated in many countries.

"Several programmes to help the Roma people in the member states ended up, say, in 'special schools' for the mentally disabled, attended mainly by the Roma children  in many cases for behavioural or language problems, not because of real mental disabilities", Viktoria Mohacsi, a liberal Hungarian Roma MEP told the Euobserver.

She suggested that "instead of promoting their integration with children of the majority population, these funds in fact reinforce the system as it currently exists".

Statistics prove the case, according to Mrs Mohacsi: three-quarters of Roma children in the Czech Republic, as well as 80 percent in some areas of Germany attend "special schools", while a large number of Roma pupils do not go to school at all.

Ms Mohacsi said that a better quality education for Roma would contribute to the EU's Lisbon agenda, which aims to build a "knowledge-based economy" and boost employment. In some Roma communities in Europe, unemployment stands at 90 percent.

A Roma Commissioner?

Several debaters at the Roma forum suggested that the EU needs a clearly indicated authority, responsible for the Roma minorities.

"In fact, it is a 'minority' spreading across the European borders and its size is higher than the population of several member states", said Austrian MEP Hannes Swoboda, the Vice-Chairman of the European Socialists.

"So, as the smallest one of them has its own commissioner, we should also consider appointing a special commissioner for the Roma people", he added.

However, Odile Quintin, Director General of Employment and Social Affairs in the European Commission, argued that the problems of the Roma citizens would be better tackled by a coordination of actors responsible for different areas, rather than by a single person.

"We have reached an approval to use the European Social Fund for dealing with the social exclusion of the Roma people, and we are currently working on a coordinated strategy to fight the problem", Mrs Quintin told the Euobserver.

The new platform was created to provide exchange of views among MEPs and other actors involved and to monitor EU funds on Roma programmes.

There are approximately seven to nine million Roma in Europe today, according to the World Bank Group.