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	UN experts urge States to confront modern-day hatred, violence against Roma by UN News, FRA, Open Society Kosovo   August 2012   UN experts urge States to confront modern-day hatred, violence against Roma.   Two independent United Nations human rights experts today called on all countries, particularly those with Roma communities, to confront modern-day hatred, violence and discrimination against this group and find solutions to their persistent exclusion.   Their comments come on Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day, or ‘Pharrajimos’ in the Romani language, which is observed each year on 2 August. Some 3,000 Roma and Sinti were murdered on the night of 2-3 August 1944, when the “Gypsy” camp in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex was liquidated by the Nazi regime.   The UN Independent Expert on minority issues, Rita Izsák, who is herself of Hungarian Roma origin, said not enough was being done to challenge “a rising tide of hostility and discrimination against Roma in Europe that shames societies.”   Ms. Izsák, whose personal experience with racism and discrimination has inspired her work for minority rights, urged States to take a zero-tolerance stance against acts of anti-Roma extremism, hatred and violence, according to a news release issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).   In addition, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Mutuma Ruteere, called for increased awareness and action to tackle these issues.   “The teaching in schools of the history of Roma, including the genocide they suffered during the Nazi regime, and awareness-raising measures to inform and sensitise populations about Roma identity and culture are essential to address the persistent prejudices that fuel racism and intolerance against them,” Mr. Ruteere said.   “There must also be a stronger message that Roma are a valued part of societies – not only in words, but in concrete actions – to protect Roma and improve their living conditions and inclusion,” he added.   The experts, welcomed efforts and initiatives under the 2011 European Union Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies.   Under the Framework, EU member countries have agreed to prepare national Roma inclusion strategies, or integrated sets of policy measures within their broader social inclusion policies for improving the situation of Roma.   Estimates suggest that up to 12 million Roma live in Europe, and other sizeable Roma populations live in Latin America and other regions, most of them on the margins of society.   Kolonia, Kosovo, April 2012.   The Boy Behind the Photo, by Chuck Sudetic. (Open Soceity)   Mentor Malluta is a little boy. He has his mother’s eyes. And he smiles an eight-year-old’s big-toothed smile when he and his friends play soccer in an over-grazed pasture behind the two-room house his father bought with a few hundred euros he managed to scrape together over the years. If you ask Mentor what he wants to be when he grows up, he’ll answer, “A policeman.” If you had asked Mentor two weeks ago whether he expected his picture to be splashed across the cover of a magazine in Switzerland that was flogging a local crime spree, he would have had no idea of what you were talking about.   Last week, however, Die Weltwoche, a German-language magazine based in Zurich, ran a cover picture of an unnamed brown-skinned boy pointing a gun straight into the reader’s face. It turned out to be Mentor. He was playing with a toy pistol. Within days, the Internet had transported the image around the world. The BBC ran a story about demands that the issue of Die Weltwoche be pulled in Germany because the photo of Mentor was inciting racism. The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and other publications followed suit. And there were calls for banning the publication in Austria and for action to be taken Switzerland.   When the photograph was taken, in 2008, Mentor was standing near a trash dump where his father was engaging in a day-to-day struggle to feed his family. The dump, which no longer exists, was located here beside Kolonia, a cluster of brick homes and a housing project built by Swiss Caritas, a charity organization, that have grown up behind some defunct drying shacks of a tobacco farm on the fringe of the town of Gjakovë, Kosovo.   When the shutter clicked, Mentor was pointing the toy gun at the camera that the photographer was pointing at him. Mentor was all of five years old then. He didn’t tell his parents that someone had taken his picture, because he had no idea that someone had taken his picture. He did not know about cameras or photographs or the World Wide Web. For the adults and kids from the 135 or so families residing in Kolonia, a camera discovered in the dump is something to sell, even if it is broken.   Next to Mentor’s picture, Die Weltwoche’s editors had placed a headline that read: “The Roma are Coming.” Inside the magazine was a story about families of Roma people traveling to Switzerland from Eastern Europe and engaging in “crime tourism.”   The power in the image of Mentor with his pistol hinges on a stereotype of a community long reviled as thieves and beggars. Yet the Roma—ten million of whom live in Europe—are, in fact, among the continent"s most vulnerable people. This prejudice and discrimination against the Roma have roots stretching back for centuries. Violence against them culminated during World War II with an event the Roma call the Porajmos, The Devouring, a campaign by Nazi Germany and its allies to exterminate them.   Organizations working to protect the rights of the Roma people lambasted Die Weltwoche for exploiting Mentor’s image to feed popular prejudice against the Roma. The photographer who took the picture, Livio Mancini, objected, saying he was attempting to draw attention to the misery of the people he witnessed combing through the trash in Kolonia to pick out plastic, paper, and metal that could be recycled. The photo agency that sold Die Weltwoche the rights to Mentor’s picture has told reporters that the magazine perverted its intended meaning.   In Europe today, press attacks on the Roma are not innocuous rhetoric. Roma activists consider Die Weltwoche’s use of the image amounts to be scapegoating, which, during this period of severe social stress due to the economic crisis, can have serious consequences for individual Roma and for the Roma people as a whole. In Hungary several years ago, neo-Nazis undertook individual serial killings of Roma. In the Czech Republic, extremists tossed fire bombs into Roma houses. The police in France, Italy, and other European Union countries have expelled Roma from the settlements they were inhabiting on the periphery of large cities. School administrators have shunted Roma kids into schools for children with mental disabilities.   A multi-layered fear walks beside too many Roma people, and especially the poorest of them, as they go about their lives. It includes the fear of running afoul of extremist members of the majority population among whom the Roma happen to be living; the fear of being victims of crime and not having police protection; the fear that comes from being illiterate and knowing too little about the outside world; the fear that coming days will not deliver the next meal; the fear of suffering disease or accident and not being able to obtain medical care; the fear that a storm will blow the roof off the house and leave everyone inside soaked and miserable; the fear generated by stories of angry outsiders setting fire to “gypsy” neighborhoods.   * Many Roma continue to face discrimination and social exclusion across the EU, according to a new report published jointly by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on 23 May 2012. The report: ‘The situation of Roma in 11 EU Member States: Survey results at a glance’ draws on surveys into the socio-economic situation of Roma and non-Roma living nearby in 11 EU Member States and in neighbouring European countries.   The report shows that in the 11 EU Member States surveyed, where the overwhelming majority of Roma EU citizens live, the situation in employment, education, housing and health is not satisfactory. On average it is worse than the situation of the non-Roma living close by. Roma also continue to experience discrimination and are not sufficiently aware of their rights guaranteed by EU law. Visit the related web page
	One day there will be a law against ecocide by Gwynne Dyer Agencies   There was no law against genocide in the early 1940s; it only became an internationally recognized crime after the worst genocide of modern history had actually happened. Similarly, there is no law against “ecocide” now. That will only come to pass when the damage to the environment has become so extreme that large numbers of people are dying from it even in rich and powerful countries.   They are already dying from the effects of environmental destruction in some poor countries, but that makes no difference because they are powerless. By the time it starts to hurt large numbers of people in powerful countries, twenty or thirty years from now, most of the politicians who conspired to smother any substantial progress at the Rio+20 Earth Summit will be safely beyond the reach of any law. But eventually there will be a law.   Rio+20, which ended last Friday, was advertised as a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to build on the achievements of the original Earth Summit, held in the same city twenty years ago. That extraordinary event produced a legally binding treaty on biodiversity, an agreement on combating climate change that led to the Kyoto accord, the first initiative for protecting the world’s remaining forests, and much more besides.   This time, few leaders of the major powers even bothered to attend. They would have come only to sign a summit statement, “The Future We Want”, that had already been nibbled to death by special interests, national and corporate. “The final document... contributes almost nothing to our struggle to survive as a species,” said Nicaraguan representative Miguel d"Escoto Brockmann. “We now face a future of increasing natural disasters.”   A plan to stop the destruction of the world’s oceans was blocked by the US, Canada and Russia. The final text simply says that countries should do more to prevent over-fishing and ocean acidification, without specifying what. A call to end subsidies for fossil fuels was removed from the final text, as was language emphasizing the reproductive rights of women. And of course there were no new commitments on fighting climate change.   The 49-page final declaration of Rio+20 contained the verb “reaffirm” 59 times. In effect, some 50,000 people from 192 countries traveled to Rio de Janeiro to “reaffirm” what was agreed there twenty years ago. The fact that the document was not even less ambitious than the 1992 final text was trumpeted as a success.   Rarely has such a large elephant labored so long to give birth to such a small mouse. The declared goal of the conference, which was to reconcile economic development and environmental protection by giving priority to the goal of a “green” (i.e. sustainable) economy, simply vanished in a cloud of vague generalities.   The final text does say that “fundamental changes in the way societies consume and produce are indispensable for achieving global sustainable development,” but it does NOT say what those fundamental changes should be. A “green economy” becomes only one of many possible ways forward. You wonder why they even bothered.   “This is an outcome that makes nobody happy. My job was to make everyone equally unhappy,” said Sha Zukang, Secretary-General of the conference, but that is not strictly true. Governments seeking to avoid commitments are happier than activists who wanted some positive results from the conference, and the hundreds of large corporations that were represented at Rio are happiest of all.   How did it end up like this? Global greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 48 percent in the past 20 years, we have lost another 3 million square kilometers (1.15 million sq. mi.) of forest, , and the world’s population has grown by 1.6 billion – yet there is less sense of urgency than there was in 1992. You can’t just blame the economy: Rio+20 would probably have ended just as badly if there had been no financial crash in 2008.   Twenty years ago the issues of climate change, biodiversity, preservation of oceans and forests, and sustainable development were relatively fresh challenges. Moreover, the world had just emerged from a long Cold War, and there was plenty of energy and hope around. Now everybody understands how tough the challenges are, and how far apart are the interests of the rich and the poor countries.   We now have a 20-year history of defeats on this agenda, and there is a lot of defeatism around. Politicians are always reluctant to be linked to lost causes, and the struggles against poverty and environmental destruction now seem to fall into that category. Thus we sleepwalk towards terrible disasters – but that doesn’t absolve our leaders of responsibility. We didn’t hire them to follow; we hired them to lead.   At the recent World Congress on Justice, Law and Governance for Environmental Sustainability, one of the events leading up to the Rio+20 conference, a group of “radical” lawyers proposed that “ecocide” should be made a crime. They were only radical in the sense that a group of lawyers agitating for a law against genocide would have been seen as radical in 1935.   One day, after many great tragedies have occurred, there will be a law against ecocide. But almost all the real culprits will be gone by then.   * Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years.
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