Declaration:
175. Anti-Tziganisms is a specific form of racism and racial discrimination against Roma ,
manifested by stigmatization, flagrant violations of their fundamental human rights, denied
access to public services, education, employment, denied participation to decision-making
processes at local and central administration levels, persecution, abuse, violence, forced
deportation, ethnic cleansing, extermination and ethnocide.
176. Drawing lessons from history, we declare as crimes against humanity the slavery of
Roma, the ethnocide / forced assimilation and genocide against Roma and the extermination of
Roma during the Holocaust.
177. Acknowledging the transnational character of the Roma identity and its common roots
from India, we strongly support the right of Roma to be recognized by the UN, by the regional
inter-governmental bodies and organizations, by States and by the whole world, as a non-territorial nation.
178. Deploring the public educational policies that deny the development of the esteem of
children and youth of Roma, we strongly condemn monocultural autarchic and inflexible
educational systems which ignore or stigmatize the Roma cultural identity.
179. We deplore the lack of equal access to employment and social services, including justice,
citizenship, housing, schooling, health care and public information for Roma and particularly
Roma women, strongly condemn those legislative provisions and public policies that encourage
such practices or avoid measures to combat them and consider this fact as being institutionalized
racism.
Programme of Action
435. We urge the United Nations to elaborate and propose for adoption to its members states
legally binding instruments on the Roma rights, such as an International Charter on Roma
Rights, in order to protect and guarantee the collective rights of the Roma people.
436. We urge the United Nations to provide adequate Roma representation in relevant
internaoitnal and intergovernmental organizations by receiving seats in the United Nations as
elected representatives of the Roma, on equal footing with the other nations of the world.
437. We recommend the United Nations and other regional bodies to provide for adequate
Roma representation in relevant international, regional and intergovernmental organizations by
receiving seats in the United Nations as elected representatives of the Roma.
438. We call upon governments to review, adopt, strengthen and enforce national legislation
prohibiting racial discrimination against Roma as well as to adopt and implement affirmative
action policies for Roma in employment, education, housing, social security and healthcare
services, in order to protect the members of these communities and to prevent and punish such
practices. Furthermore, appropriate monitoring bodies, with a local network, need to be
established to ensure that governments fullfil their human rights obligations.
439. We recommend States to include the issue of combating racial discrimination against
Roma as one of the major topics in bilateral and multilateral treaties.
440. We urge the United Nations, Council of Europe, and the Organisation of American States
to establish under thier jurisdiction, a Permanent Roma Forum, as a body of elected
representatives, which shall monitor and report on the Roma situation in the world and on the
implementation of international standards addressing the Roma issue.
441. We welcome the CERD General Recommendation XXVII „Discrimination on Roma"
and urge governments to implement these recommenations.
442. We urge governments to ensure the institutional development and full participation to
central and local administration, to ensure the right to free movement of the Roma, to support
the preservation and development of the Roma cultural identity, and to provide adequate
camping places with all necesary facilities for those Roma who preserve the nomadic life-style.
443. We urge Governments to take concrete measures and support the full development of the
Roma children and youth positive self-esteem, the deconstruction of their internalized stigma
and the Roma identity awareness, by establishing identity assertive education institutions and by
promoting the Roma history, Romani as teaching language and ethnic assertion education
programs in the mainstream school.
444. We call upon States to provide the Roma children with equal access to quality education
by the desegregation of the schooling system, by enabling Roma parents to take part to school
processes and decision; by training and employing Roma teachers and school mediators; and by
the development of a more sensitive, inclusive and flexible education systems and school
curricula, including non-formal education and distance education, internet classes in places for
encampment.
445. We urge governments to fully support the intercultural education, including the provision
of adequate funding, for the inclusion of the Roma history in text books and school curricula.
446. We strongly urge governments to draw lessons from history, to acknowledge and
publicly condemn the Roma slavery and the German Holocaust against Roma during the Second
World War, and we also call upon States which are responsible of these crimes against humanity
to fully assume their responsibility, to provide public appology and prompt, adequate and fair
reparation and compensation to Roma communities and individuals who were victims of such
policies and practices.
447. We urge the United Nations to use its influence to immediately stop the Germany policy
of Roma deportation to Former Yugoslavia, a region of ethnic cleansing and war.
448. We urge States and inter-governamental bodies to immediately call upon the involved
forces to stop the genocide and the ethnic cleansing against Roma in countries where it takes
place. Beginning in 1999, Roma were ethnically cleanesed from Kosovo by ethnic Albanians.
Kosovo is the worst catastrophy for Roma since the Holocaust.
TRAVELLERS
States and Governments should pay particular attention to and adopt immediate and concrete
measures to eradicate the widespread discrimination and persecution targeting Travellers
including through the establishment of structures and processes, in partnership between the
public authorities and representatives of the Traveller Communities.
