Before coming to Hungary, it wasn’t clear to me whether I would be able to make a positive contribution to Human Rights from an eastern European country, rather than Africa, where the rest of colleagues were sent. Now that I am here, however, I am confident that I am making a contribution to an important situation that requires more attention. The Roma situation doesn’t get much attention in North America, if any, but it should.

I am going to use your favorite source of information and mine, Wikipedia, to help me explain the issue;

The Romani people are an ethnic group living in many communities all over the world. The Roma are among the best known ethnic groups that appear in literature and folklore, and are often referred to as Gypsies. The Roma are still thought of as wandering nomads in the popular imagination, despite the fact that today the vast majority live in permanent housing. This widely dispersed ethnic group lives across the world not only near their historic heartland in Southern and Eastern Europe. Worldwide there is an estimated population of at least 15 million Roma. The official number of Romani people is disputed in many countries. Because many Roma often refuse to register their ethnic identity in official censuses for fear of discrimination, unofficial estimates are undertaken in efforts to reveal their true numbers.

The Roma — who have often been stereotyped as thieves, tramps, con men and fortune tellers — have been subject to various forms of discrimination throughout history. Due in part to their past semi-nomadic lifestyle and differences in language and culture, there has been a great deal of mutual distrust between the Roma and the more settled indigenous inhabitants of the areas to which the Roma migrated.

Antizigan discrimination has continued in the 2000s, particularly in the Balkans, in areas such as Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia. Roma are often confined to low-class ghettos, are subject to discrimination in jobs and schools, and are often subject to police brutality. In Bulgaria, professor Ognian Saparev has written articles stating that ‘Gypsies’ should be confined to ghettoes because they do not assimilate, are culturally inclined towards theft, have no desire to work, and use their minority status to ‘blackmail’ the majority. This was a reaction to the murder of his colleague professor Stanimir Kaloyanov who was beaten to death by a Roma group while he was celebrating his son’s prom in Sofia in May 2005.

In the Czech Republic the majority of the Czech people do not want to have Roma as neighbors (almost 90%, more than any other group) seeing them as thieves and social parasites. In spite of long waiting time for a child adoption, Romani children from orphanages are almost never adopted by Czech couples. After the fall of communist party from power in 1989 the jobs traditionally employing Roma either disappeared or were taken over by workers from Ukraine and the stereotypes about Roma further reduced their employability.[citation needed]

As of 2006, many Roma who had previously lived in Kosovo lived in displaced refugee communities in Montenegro and Serbia. Those who remain often fear attacks from ethnic Albanians who see them as “Serb Collaborators”. In February, 2007, three Romani women in Slovakia received compensation after suing a hospital for sterilizing them while they were underage and without their consent. While the sterilizations occurred in 1999 and 2002, and the women had been repeatedly appealing to prosecutors since then, they were up until this time ignored.

The European Center for Antiziganism Research officially filed a complaint against Sacha Cohen — who plays Borat in the mockumentary film [of the same name] — for inciting violence and violating Germany’s anti-discrimination laws. One part of the satirical film, which supposedly portrays Borat’s impoverished native village, actually shows a Romani village in Romania. In character, Borat has referred to himself as a former “gypsy catcher,” and he has made a reference to “running over Gypsies with a Hummer”.

After actually meeting Romani people, I’ve come to realize that the Borat joke that the ECAR referred to wouldn’t have been accepted if he had made reference to running over a women, a gay person, or a black person. The stereotype and prosecution of Romani people needs to stop, this is 21st century, not the 15th century, and this behavior should not be accepted any more. These are real people with real problems that shouldn’t be ignored.