Press & MediaFeed
31 July, 2017 New Content !Today, the ECRE Board agreed to the integration of the RomaniWorld.com website content with ECRE's MediaFeed during the month of August 2017. RomaniWorld.com was a major medium for contemporary Romani information on cultural and economic affairs which ceased operations several months ago because of lack of funding support. MediaFeed on this site will open a new section for RomaniWorld content by mid August 2017.
November, 2007 RomaRadio Coming
Unfortunately, as a result of staff availability the RomaRadio technology is ready but there has not been time to set this up. We hope to complete this process shortly.
The Education Interviews
The Education Interviews with our Secretary General continue to be the most popular pages on the RomaniWorld. Com site. A new interview has just been completed in the light of recent events in Italy as well as the UK which provides a follow up showing the lack of response by the European Commission to our recorded advocacy has led to appalling failures in economic performance of several European Union Member States as well as a continueation of an unacceptable abuse of Roma rights. As frequently emphasised in the past, Member State governemnts spend many times more on direct inventives to segregate Roma children and deny them education than the value of "initiatives" designed to "integrate the Roma".
The European Constitution and failing economies
The CESS-Cigany Economy Simulation System 2007 Report will show that Central and Eastern European economies lose around Euro50 billion each year. This is the opportunity cost of not educating Roma children which prevents them from subsequently gaining professional training. This amazingly open and unashamed racism also reflects an unacceptable level of competence in economic planning of human resources. This incompetence in planning is a direct outcome of accession procedures emphasising the transposition of European law and the European Commission, as Guardian of the Treaties, not enforcing the law (see next section).
Therefore the European Union openly tolerates the practical expression of racist motivations as determinants of economic policy. Such officially condoned corruption undermines the growth in the economy hurting all in society.
The amount lost through such racism and political ineptitude is equivaent to 40% of the European Union Budget. The European Commission knowingly transfers this amount of public funds to compensate for the damage caused by these racist policies and does nothing to stop them. In other words European Member States tolerate a massive economic tradeoff between an acceptable level of waste in the European Budget allocation and what they seem to have decided are tolerable levels of economic planning incompetence and human rights abuse. The European Commission cannot plead ignorance over this issue since it is on the record (see Correspondence) that the economic consequences of such racism was drawn to the attention of Commissioner Gunter Verheugen in 1999 (ADF) as well as in 2003 (ECRE Special Schools Report); this rational advice on the potential economic impact of breaking European Law was ignored.
Clearly the current European legal structures are inadequate; they simply do not work. The so-called "Amending Treaty", drawn up by Angela Merkel and other heads of state, as an open attempt to camouflage the original draft European Constitution but avoid referenda, contains nothing to prevent the continuation of this form of horrendous social and economic abuse of a segment of citizens of the European Union.
As a footnote, the CESS Report notes that this situation, that is the loss to the economy, is actually accelerating.
The European Constitution and the crisis of individual freedoms
The fact that the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary and the Slovak Republic 1, can with impunity, break European Law in a wholesale manner and subject over 150,000 Roma children to segregated educational denial makes a mockery of the ability of the European Union to guarantee the defence of any individuals from arbitrary acts by government and administrations.
The shameful record of failures to act by the European Commission, European Petitions Committee and the European Ombudsman, in the case of these children, is a monument to their ineffectiveness in handling a really important issue of widespread law breaking and maladministration.
This calls into question the content of the European Constitution whose only guarantee of the indivividual freedoms of European citizens is the adherence of these very institutions to their mandates and their seriousness in upholding European law. They have failed in a drastic manner when faced with a quantifiable, identifiable and serious breach of European law by member state governments and have failed to uphold the rights of defenceless children; more so defenseless because they are Roma.
This frank European Union institutional discrimination is a defacto European Constitutional crisis for it demonstrates the irrelevance of what is said on the issue of individual freedoms and human rights in the European constitutional draft, let alone in the renamed version as a "treaty". Irrelevant because the Constitutional draft and all previous treaties and those which may follow, place these demonstrably corrupt institutions capable of arbitrary decision making, centre stage. There is therefore no guarantor of individual freedoms let alone any defence of human rights. Europeans have no guarantees of freedom.
For the record
In 2005 Netherlands Radio interviewed the ECRE Secretary General concenring the Roma Decade Initiative. The Secretary General stated that the track record of the governments concerned was that of spending around Euro 1 bilion each, per decade, to proactively segregate and deny education to Roma children. This comes to a very conservative total of around Euro 5 billion when one adds in the other accession countries involved in the Roma Decade initiative. The Roma decade initiative summed just Euro 40 million over as many years. This is a ratio of 125:1 (5 Billion to 40 Million) that is 125 times more money being spent to enforce discrimination, in the form of a callous segregated educational denial, as is being spent to "integrate" these same children. The whole initiative suffered from a complete lack of rational planning and constituted no more than a public relations stunt. Typical of such initiatives it has built up hopes only to disappoint.
Naturally the Secretary General predicted that nothing would come of this initiative and so far he seems to have been right.
This interview can be accessed below:
Radio Netherlands interviews ECRE Secretary General
Radio Netherlands has broadcast part of an interview they completed with Hector McNeill concerning the Roma Decade initiative:
Unfortunately Radio Netherlands no longer have this radio feed posted on their website.
1 This figure relates to these three countries. With the latest enlargement we estimate that this figure has increased more than four times. |
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