EU Referendum


EU politics: the wages of freedom


18/11/2014



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Readers may recall our piece ten days ago on the ECHR judgement preventing the Swiss deporting an Afghan family back to Italy, where they had first illegally entered mainland Europe. The report was picked up by Booker, the only legacy media journalist to have done so, leaving an important part of the immigration story largely untold.

The essence of the ECHR case, though, was that the conditions in Italian reception camps was so poor that keeping people in them amounted to "mistreatment", thus breaching their human rights. But that meant that the "penalty", such as it is, falls on those countries which are unable their illegal immigrants back to the place where they first entered Europe.

Now, it seems, more direct action is being considered against Italy, on a different but related matter – the treatments of the Roma, who are complaining bitterly about their housing conditions in a centre in the suburbs of Rome. What makes this different, though, is that there is persistent reference to the European Commission getting involved.

The trigger for this seems to be the Italian government determination to house their Roma in separate camps or controlled housing, and the latest concern is plans for a camp in Rome, "on a very remote and inaccessible site, fenced in with a surveillance system".

Such a scheme, it is being suggested, "seriously limits fundamental rights of those concerned, completely isolating them from the surrounding world and depriving them of the possibility of adequate work or education".

Currently, the focus in on a property named, "Best House Rom", described as a "windowless centre on the outskirts of Rome that is a temporary home to some 300 people". The residents have just 2.5m² of space each, despite the local council having poured €1m into the properly last year.

The camp dwellers are prevented by council regulations from applying for public housing even if they were born in Italy, trapping them permanently in fenced-off centres far from schools, shops, health care centres or workplaces.

It is this isolation of a community essentially on ethnic grounds that is the primary concern of officials in Brussels. "The conditions are worse than in prison. There's a total lack of human rights, we cannot allow people to be treated like beasts", says Senator Manuela Serra of the Five Star Movement – Grillo's outfit, the one that is keeping Farage afloat in Brussels.

The irony of a group associated with Farage supporting the Roma should not be allowed to pass, but the main issue is a continuous and systematic breach of the Roma's "human rights" which have come the attention of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

These reports are proving highly embarrassing to the Commission, especially as they are being told of reports of daily discrimination and violence against Roma in "an ever-growing climate of racism".

Already, the ECHR has ruled in a case of discrimination brought by 18 Roma students from the Ostrava region in the Czech Republic. They had complained they had been "systematically assigned to segregated schools based on their racial or ethnic identity rather than intellectual capacities".

Now the European Roma Rights Centre and Amnesty have sought Commission intervention under the Race Equality Directive (2000/43/EC), in the hope that infringement proceedings will be commenced.

Now the "Best House" case has reared its head, infringement proceedings against Italy are also being talked about, putting the Commission seriously on the spot. The Italians have had enough of the Roma and have lost patience with them, as has virtually every other government in Europe.

Nobody wants the Roma but this is freedom of movement writ large and it's now payback time. The Commission has created a situation which is unsolvable, but they can't afford to ignore it. They have to solve the unsolvable because, as they have so often said, freedom of movement is non-negotiable.

The only problem is that unsolvable really is unsolvable and there is nothing quite as unsolvable as the Roma.

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