Urgetn Call to Action-ITALY, HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS RECEIVE PENAL ORDER FOR THEIR WORK

URGENT CALL TO ACTION

Italy, February 18th, 2010


ITALY, TWO HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS FROM EVERYONE GROUP RECEIVE A PENAL ORDER (A CRIMINAL CONVICTION WITHOUT GOING TO TRIAL) FOR THEIR HUMANITARIAN WORK: “IT IS THE FIRST TIME IN THE WORLD”


THE NEWS GIVEN BY THE HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION: “A CONVICTION BASED ON INACCURATE EVIDENCE GIVEN BY A POLICE OFFICER. IT IS THE UMPTEENTH EPISODE OF ABUSE OF POWER BY THE ITALIAN AUTHORITIES”


EVERYONE GROUP APPEALS TO THE UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION AND THE FRONTLINE FOUNDATION: “WE ARE ASKING FOR SUPPORT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS, VICTIMS IN ITALY OF VIOLENCE, INTIMIDATION AND JUDICIARY ABUSE OF POWER, A WORSE SITUATION THAN IN TOTALITARIAN REGIMES WHERE THE INDIVIDUAL IS AT LEAST GUARANTEED THE RIGHT TO DEFEND HIMSELF



On February 12th, 2010, Roberto Malini and Dario Picciau, co-presidents with Matteo Pegoraro of EveryOne Group, international human rights organization based in Italy, received notification of a penal order, with the prison sentence commuted into a heavy fine. In the decree, issued on 5/11/09 by the Pesaro Justice Court - Office of the Magistrate for Preliminary Investigations – condemns the activists for the offence punishable by art. 110, 340 of the Italian Criminal Code, because on December 20th, 2008 “in complicity with each other, they caused the interruption, or at least disturbed a police operation aimed at identifying three foreign citizens, and used abusive and disparaging language towards the officers from Pesaro-Urbino Police Headquarters, and interfered in the carrying out of their duty.”


“It is the umpteenth episode of abuse from the authorities (and in particular from the Police Headquarters) we have been subjected to in Pesaro and in Italy” say the co-presidents of the Group. ”Throughout 2008 and in the early months of 2009 we were repeatedly summoned to police headquarters because of our humanitarian work in defence of the Roma community living in our Country”.


After the protests of our Organization for the endless camp clearances of Roma families (without any offer of assistance) and after our protests over the illegitimate expulsion of a group of Afghan refugees who had applied for asylum, the Pesaro Police Commissioner issued Roberto Malini a verbal warning on the following grounds: “Seeing the Roma are notorious criminals, I consider EveryOne Group part of a criminal organization and I invite it to cease its activity”. Following this warning, the activists of EveryOne Group were subjected to various episodes of intimidation and provocation, while the brutal operations aimed at driving the Roma out of the city continued. The attitude of the Police Commissioner and the anti-Roma programme carried out by the Pesaro authorities have been the subject of various Parliamentary questions, leading to the transfer of the Police Commissioner to a different detachment.


Following the camp clearance (in mid winter) of the last Roma families to take refuge in Pesaro, EveryOne Group filed a complaint to the Public Prosecutor's Office at the same Pesaro Justice Court - reporting both the violation of human rights and the open hostility shown towards human rights defenders.


“We were expecting the Prosecutor's Office to investigate the abuse committed by the local authorities towards the Roma community”, say Malini, Pegoraro and Picciau, “actions that have led to several deaths (due to the hardship suffered by seriously ill people, who were suddenly left without a shelter over their heads), miscarriages (due to the stress and fear experienced by the pregnant women faced with so many armed police officers) and serious humanitarian emergencies.

Instead, the same authorities made use of a legal instrument that exists only in Italy, an instrument that violates article 24 of the Italian Constitution. We are talking about a conviction without a trial, yet another intimidatory tool used against human rights defenders which allows an untrue statement made by a police officer to become law without the accused being given the opportunity to contradict him.


We are aware that there is a danger of falling into a legal ‘black hole’, but we have decided to oppose the sentence and we will continue to oppose it on all levels, even if this means taking the case before the European Court of Human Rights. It is a fundamental principle of civility and democracy which does not only concern this episode, but international activism as whole, and the endless obstacles and dangers involved in defending the lives and the dignity of our most vulnerable citizens”.


As for the case in question, Roberto Malini and Dario Picciau say “on the evening of December 20th, 2008 a police officer was talking in an arrogant manner to a young Roma man, while his colleague waited in the patrol car in front of the bar to be served with sandwiches and drinks. We greeted the young man, Nico Grancea, who we knew very well seeing we had been offering him assistance for over year. In answer, we received from the first officer a brusque and threatening invitation to show some identification. We have had dealings with the police force for years and therefore have sufficient experience to know not to rise to the bait. The police officer took down our details without issuing any notification. The magistrates investigating the case did not listen to what the owner of the bar, Mr. Grancea, or the EveryOne activists had to say. The Pesaro investigating magistrate then decided for “a conviction without a trial”.


“Through our appeal and the relevant procedures for defending our humanitarian work” says EveryOne Group, “we intend to bring the case to the attention of the authorities in charge of protecting human rights defenders, in order for them to establish efficient organisms that defend the work of activists who are forced to operate in extremely difficult conditions”.


On February 14th, 2010 Malini and Picciau's case was brought up by the co-president of EveryOne, Matteo Pegoraro, in Dublin, during the 5th Frontline Platform for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, which EveryOne Group (the only European organization) had been invited to attend along with 99 other human rights defenders from all over the world – activists who have received several threats during the course of their human rights activities. “We are appealing to the Frontline Foundation (which protects human rights activists all over the world in cooperation with the United Nations and European institutions) to take up our case. We hope too that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya, - always very alert to episodes of this kind - to immediately intervene against this judiciary abuse, which has no precedent in European activism. We will fight” says Pegoraro, “to ensure that these two human rights defenders – who have been involved for many years in difficult campaigns in defence of minority groups – are not subjected to this violation, even more so if we consider that as co-presidents of EveryOne, they were operating in Pesaro and on Italian territory on behalf of the European MP, Viktoria Mohacsi with the precise aim of investigating the behaviour of the authorities towards the Roma people in Italy.


On behalf of our group, we invite civil society, the politicians who are more alert to matters of fundamental rights, the human and civil rights associations and organizations and the European and international institutions and authorites, to express their criticism of an action that goes against all the charters on the human rights of the individual – as well as violating the international laws on the protection and freedom of action and movement of human rights defenders”.


For further information:

EveryOne Group

+39 393 4010237 :: +39 334 3449180 :: :: +39 331 3585406

www.everyonegroup.com :: info@everyonegroup.com

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romani

FACTORY of DEATH

At about 7 a.m. on the morning of February 25th in Pesaro (Italy), about 20 officers, (regular police and municipal police) entered the abandoned factory situated in Via Fermo, 49, where 30 Romanian Roma have been living for the last year.


Among them patients being treated at San Salvatore Hospital for heart problems and tumours; many women and nine minors, including a few-month-old baby. The authorities gave the order to clear the abandoned factory where the roma were living and dispersed the families.

Virgil Caldarar, one of the two Roma children who will never be born. They died in their mothers womb during (or immediately after) the tragic clearance. These are not isolated cases, because the endless camp clearances without any offer of alternative housing lead to deaths and humanitarian tragedies every year.


EveryOne Group met the parents of the babies and recorded their story in the hope that this umpteenth case of abuse the Roma people are subjected to does not go unnoticed.


Interview transcription:

We have lived here for a year without any trouble, we clean car windscreens for a living. That is our job, we are quiet people. Yes, they were armed, like a gang. I don't know why they came here. They could have just come and told us we couldn't stay here any more. My wife was very frightened. She was distraught, and the result was that we lost our baby. I may be poor, but I wanted that baby.


If the police hadn't turned up, things would have been all right. We had been at the factory for a year and nobody had ever said anything. But that day the police came. I don't know why. On February 25th a lot of policemen came to the factory in Via Fermo. They came early in the morning and forced all the families to remain inside, then they asked to see our papers. There were a lot of them, 30 or 20 policemen. They wanted to take my 4-year old daughter and put her in an institute until she was 18. I didn't want that to happen. I would rather have died than lost my child. Just imagine how a mother feels if she can't see her daughter again until she is 18. So I fled with my daughter, and I was three months pregnant. This episode led to me miscarrying.


I was terrified, and so was my sister. Then we fled to Rome and we were both ill. We had nowhere to sleep, for two days. Then we went back to Romania. I felt ill on the bus too. I spent two nights on the bus travelling back to Romania. Then in Romania I found out I'd lost the baby. If the police hadn't arrived, the pregnancy would have gone ahead. I'd even had a sonogram done. I'd done everything. We were going to call it Michele.


I collect a bit of money for my family here. I send 20 or 30 euros back to Romania to support them. Because our home country is not a good place, if it had been, I would have stayed there with my children. The police... and what happened... I was so scared. The stress... the fright. I slept out in the open for 2 nights, on the ground. I caught cold, I was in pain. I was very ill all the way to Romania. I was in hospital for three days in Romania. I'd suffered a miscarriage. The police knew she was expecting a baby, I told them so myself. I said: "My wife is expecting a baby and she sleeps in here. I have a place to sleep here with my wife". But they told me they didn't care, that we had to leave the factory. We had to leave and my wife miscarried. I'm really sorry.

On February 25th the police arrived and I was over two months' pregnant. There were a lot of police officers and I was very scared. I fell to the ground and I felt a pain inside my stomach. Then I fled to Rome because I had no place to sleep here as they had sent the police and local authorities, they don't help us here in Pesaro. When the police arrived here, they frightened me because they told me they would take my little girl away from me. When I heard that I fled with my daughter. I was expecting another baby. I had to sleep on the floor for days and I caught a cold. When I arrived in Romania I found out I had miscarried. I felt terrible. I felt a pain in my heart. I thought the baby was still alive, like my other two children. That's what I thought. And I thought that God had seen the harm those policemen had done to me.

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romani

It is just sickening

I wanted to post this because it is sickening but sadly, reflects the way people really do feel. This is the very reason we are fighting!

Gypsy Scams
Posted Nov. 25, 2009
Comment on: (Article) World's Worst Travel Scams

I disagree with the recommendations on the Baby Toss & Newspaper Scams. Don't just walk away from Gypsies. The locals in every country & the local police, HATE local Gypsies, with good reason.

Best thing to do is to hit the nearest Gypsy as hard as possible. Kick 'em in the face, the groin, whatever. Doesn't matter if they're kids or females. All Gypsies are trained to steal, so you have every right to protect yourself.

I had one attempt to pull the newspaper scam on me in Madrid...I punched him so hard, I knocked him out. No other passer by took much notice, as I said, they hate Gypsies, so they're happy to see them get a beating.

Link to original article
http://www.travelandleisure.com/comments/7853#

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US Holocaust Museum INTERVIEW ABOUT THE PORRAJMOS, BUT BEGAN BY PROVIDING THEIR OWN NUMBER OF OUR LOSSES.

The Dangers Faced by Roma in Europe Today

Thursday, September 24, 2009

DESCRIPTION:
Rob Kushen, the Managing Director of the European Roma Rights Center, discuss human rights abuses against Roma in Europe today.

TRANSCRIPT:
ARIANA BERENGAUT: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention podcast. This is Ariana Berengaut, your guest host for this week’s episode.

For centuries, Europeans stigmatized the Roma, sometimes referred to as gypsies, as social outcasts and scapegoats. When World War II broke out in 1939, the Nazi regime intensified its persecution of the Roma, transporting them to ghettos and concentration camps across Europe. While it is not known precisely how many Roma were killed in the Holocaust, scholars believe that the Nazis killed up to 220,000 Roma, which was around one-quarter of the entire population of European Roma. We’ve invited Rob Kushen to talk about human rights abuses against Roma in Europe today. Rob Kushen is the Managing Director of the European Rights Roma Centre. Hello, Rob, and thank you for joining our program.

ROB KUSHEN: Thanks for having me, and thanks for covering this subject.

ARIANA BERENGAUT: Can you give us some background on the Roma today. Where do they live and what types of discrimination and dangers they continue to face?

ROB KUSHEN: Sure. Well, they are, by most accounts, the largest minority group in Europe. The population numbers are not known with certainty, but the estimates range on the order of 10 to 12 million people and they live throughout Europe. There are large concentrations in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and countries in Eastern Europe. But there are also an estimated 150,000 in Italy, a couple hundred thousand in France and in Germany as well. So they’re pretty much everywhere in Europe. There are some in the United States in addition, and in other parts of the world.

And as far as the kinds of discrimination they face, it is perhaps not quite as serious as the existential threats faced during the Second World War and the Holocaust, but quite serious indeed. And in fact, interesting to note that in the run-up to the European Parliament elections this year, a far right extremist party in the Czech Republic was running television advertisements calling for a final solution to the gypsy problem, deliberately evoking the effort to exterminate Roma as well as Jews during the Second World War.

For the most part, the problems faced by Roma in Europe are, they vary in intensity but they are similar. They face acts of violence, both state sponsored acts of violence, acts of police abuse, as well as violence by private individuals, extremist groups, skinheads and the like. They face deliberate segregation in schools and in housing, discrimination in employment. There is a legacy of coercive sterilization of Romani women, which unfortunately, there are still cases being reported of coercive sterilizations in countries like the Czech Republic and Slovakia. So it’s a wide variety of abuses, a lot of problems connected with forced eviction and being rendered homeless, having their property destroyed, being subject to physical abuse during the course of being forcibly evicted from informal settlements or illegal squats.

ARIANA BERENGAUT: Are Roma citizens of the countries that they reside in?

ROB KUSHEN: In some cases yes, and in some cases no and citizenship is certainly an issue for some Roma. There was a great migration of Roma out of the countries of former Yugoslavia and across the borders of countries within the former Yugoslavia as a result of the conflict there in the ’90s. And so you have a number of Roma who either are stateless as a result or have gone to other countries and do not have the citizenship of the country where they reside.

ARIANA BERENGAUT: You mentioned the TV ad in the Czech Republic. Is this sentiment broadly held and accepted sort of nationwide, or are the dangers really posed from far right fringe groups?

ROB KUSHEN: Well I think the far right groups in the Czech Republic, Hungary and elsewhere are, to some extent, reflecting a popular sentiment. To some extent, they are feeding a popular sentiment and kind of reinforcing it as a-- so I think there’s a kind of two-way feedback mechanism. I don’t think that if you poled people in the Czech Republic they would be advocating extermination of the Roma. But on the other hand, when you poll them and ask them if you want to live next to a Roma person, if you want work with a Roma person, if you want your children going to school with Romani children, the majority of citizens will say no. So the underlying discrimination and intolerance toward Roma is a widely held view throughout the region. And, again, I don’t want to just pick on Eastern Europe because the situation in Italy for example is just as bad.

ARIANA BERENGAUT: Could you actually speak about the situation for Roma in Italy and particularly the role of the Italian Government in sort of perpetrating the...

ROB KUSHEN: Yes. Well, I think Italy is a very a disturbing situation because precisely of the role of the government. This is a country where a year ago, the government essentially declared Roma a security threat and has dealt with Roma in that context and passed a number of emergency decrees and laws, both at a national level and at municipal levels, to try to stem the flow of Roma into the country, to try to force or persuade Roma to leave the county, and to in general make life very difficult for them. And this is a deliberate government policy which continues unabated to this day. The government has been actively engaged in forcibly destroying Roma settlements, rendering many people homeless. And under the guise of so-called census activity, trying to identify Roma that may not have adequate legal status to remain in Italy and expelling them and trying to create a climate, again, that would discourage any other Roma from other parts of Europe from migrating to Italy.

ARIANA BERENGAUT: Has there been any sort of international pressure on Italy to abate...

ROB KUSHEN: There has been some. And the European Roma Rights Centre together with the Open Society Justice Initiative and also the OsservAzione and some other groups in Italy have been pressing the issue and encouraging the European Commission to look at violations of European law that Italy has committed through its laws, policies, and practices directed against Roma. But I would say, up until now, the response from the international community, from other governments in particular, has been weak. And the reason for that is that they-- there’s, I suppose, a certain sympathy both for Italy’s efforts to deal not just with Roma migrants, but with migrants from other countries that are considered undesirable, as well as a specific sympathy with dealing with the Roma. And so I think the response from Europe has not been as strong as it should be.

ARIANA BERENGAUT: Has the E.U. provided any sort of guidance?

ROB KUSHEN: No. And that’s, as I said, that’s where we’ve been looking because for example, what Italy is doing calls into question its commitment to allow free movement of European Union citizens. As many of the people, Roma in Italy, first of all, many of them are Italian citizens and they’re being affected as well. But those who are not, many of them are from E.U. member states. And so it does not seem that Italy is interested in living up to its commitments to allow E.U. citizens to come to Italy and live there and work there. It’s also, in our view, violated the commitment to ensure data privacy through its census activity of finger printing and photographing of Roma citizens, and also violated antidiscrimination provisions because their-- many of Italy’s actions are directed specifically at Roma populations. In fact, you know, the laws refer, in many cases, to so-called nomads, which is widely accepted as a term that refers only to Roma. And it preserves the mythology that Roma are not really-- that this is not a settled sedentary population, that these are nomads, which happens to be factually wrong, but also makes clear that the people that Italy is really targeting with many of its actions are Roma.

ARIANA BERENGAUT: Have any states been particularly successful at protecting Roma rights?

ROB KUSHEN: Well, I think some states have made strides. I think a number of the Scandinavian countries have done a better job, and they tend to do a better job with addressing the rights of minorities and migrants in addition to the Roma population specifically. I think that in Eastern Europe there’s been a certain amount of progress made in governments adopting at a very high level, broad, policy-- from a broad policy perspective, adopting favorable policies against discrimination and in favor of inclusion and integration. But those policies tend to be ineffective, not implemented, and have little impact.

ARIANA BERENGAUT: Are you optimistic for the future, or do you see the overall situation as just deteriorating?

ROB KUSHEN: Well, I suppose if you’re in an advocacy position, you have to be optimistic.

ARIANA BERENGAUT: Absolutely.

ROB KUSHEN: But I think that in the short term, the situation is not good. I think it has deteriorated. I think the economic downturn does not help, and it just exacerbates tensions. It makes resource allocation questions much more fraught at the level of domestic politics, and unfortunately, in the last year, in certain countries we’ve seen both a rise of violence and a rise of extremist politics, which is quite disturbing.

ARIANA BERENGAUT: Absolutely. Well thank you so much for your time and for speaking with us today.

ROB KUSHEN: Thank you again for covering the topic. I appreciate the opportunity to let more people know about the issue.

NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about responding to and preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/genocide.

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human rights