h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

UN calls for EU help on Roma children in Europe.

Roma, Sinti, and traveller's children in south-eastern Europe are facing serious discrimination, social exclusion and disproportional poverty, according to a new UN report. UNICEF calls on the EU to help improve the situation. These children in south-eastern Europe are facing "human rights abuses on a large scale".

The children "remain invisible" because they do not have birth certificates and therefore they cannot get basic health-care and education, etc.

As many as one million Roma children in south-eastern Europe are unaccounted for in official statistics, according to UNICEF.

Later in life, they will not be able to vote, make use of the social services nor register their own children.

UNICEF called on the EU to use its leverage to raise accountability. "If you look at new member states, their problems have not been solved; in fact, they are getting worse," he said.

UNICEF presented the report at the German parliament together with the report on Roma in Germany.

That study found there are some 50,000 Roma from the former Yugoslavia living in Germany on refugee status who are not eligible for integration and language courses because they don't have official papers.

"Roma children should be given the chance to break up the vicious cycle of poverty, discrimination and prejudices," said Reinhart Schlagintweit, head of UNICEF Germany in a statement on Monday.

He warned of the "dramatic consequences" when "hundreds of thousands of children around the world grow up in ghettoes, without educational perspectives in the heart of Europe."

I believe we Europeans are hiding in the jungle of bureaucratic papers, because we do not wish to know how to brake up that tough vicious cycle of poverty, discrimination, criminality , isolation and prejudices.


Alfredo, Amsterdam July 2007