A new report published today by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) demonstrates the depth of institutional racism towards Roma in the police and criminal legal systems of three Balkan countries: Greece, Serbia, and North Macedonia.
The report, Ruthless & Racist: Policing Roma in the Balkans, reveals widespread cultures of impunity amongst the countries’ police forces and finds failures to protect Roma, as well as to adequately investigate racially motivated hate crimes, to be common to law enforcement in all three countries. The report draws on nearly three decades of ERRC litigation and human rights monitoring to demand that state authorities abide by their declared commitments to the principles of justice and equal protection before the law.
“There is a growing acknowledgement from governments and international bodies that institutional racism in justice and law enforcement is a problem that’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore” said the ERRC’s President, Đorđe Jovanović. “This issue is all of Europe’s problem, not just Roma. This report combined with our previous research, advocacy, and countless court cases, shows there is more than enough evidence to prove a culture of racism in the police. Now is the time for politicians to start doing something about it.”
The findings in each of the three countries were remarkably uniform when it comes to policing, despite the different politicial contexts of the the three states (not least the fact that one is an EU member state). In each state, violently racist policing can be seen as one manifestation of a wider crisis in the criminal legal system which allows for recurring abuses of human rights, a lack of accountability, and a culture of impunity enjoyed by police officers. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the official institutional response has long been one of outright denial of the existence and scale of the problem.
The new report, and its companion report on six EU countries, builds on research carried out by the ERRC and global criminal justice watchdog Fair Trials into the experience of Romani people in European criminal legal systems. This research project, which was carried out in eight European countries, described how “Romani communities are not only heavily targeted, but even harassed and provoked by the police.” The evidence in this new report published today leaves little doubt that issues around access to justice and antigypsyism run deeper than discrete incidents of police brutality. Numerous documented cases reveals that law-enforcement agencies are institutionally racist; that antigypsyism is clearly evident in the ways Romani communities are policed; and that there is official tolerance at the highest levels of a culture of impunity within law enforcement when it comes to mistreatment of Roma.
The ERRC’s recommendations for each of the three Balkan countries are backed up by similar calls from the United Nations and Council of Europe and include:
- Ensuring confessions obtained under torture are inadmissible.
- Guaranteeing an enforceable right to adequate compensation and rehabilitation for victims after police brutality.
- Access to legal counsel.
- Independent, empowered, and well-resourced complaint mechanisms.
- Proportionate sanctions for police offenders.
- Protection of victims and witnesses from police intimidation.
- Monitoring and collection of disaggregated data to combat ethnic profiling.
- Abandoning ineffective ‘unconscious biases training’ of police officers. Instead, police training should focus on rights complaint education on officers’ legal obligations and the consequences of infractions, reinforced with rights complaint working rules and procedures through the entire criminal legal system.
The full sets of recommendations can be found in the report, Ruthless & Racist: Policing Roma in the Balkans, available to download in English here.
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