<http://euobserver.com/9/23629/?rk=1> UN calls for EU help on Roma children 06.03.2007 - 09:29 CET | By Helena Spongenberg
Roma children in south-eastern Europe are facing serious discrimination, social exclusion and disproportional poverty, according to a new UN report. The author calls on the EU to help improve the situation. The report from UNICEF - the UN's children's fund - found that Roma, Sinti and traveller's children in south-eastern Europe are facing "human rights abuses on a large scale". The children "remain invisible" because they do not have birth certificates and therefore do not have access to the social agencies that ensure they have basic health-care and education. As many as one million Roma children in south-eastern Europe are unaccounted for in official statistics, said Gordon Alexander from UNICEF. Later in life, they will not be able to vote, make use of the social services nor register their own children. Mr Alexander called on the EU to use its leverage to raise accountability. "If you look at new member states, their problems have not been solved; in fact, they are getting worse," he said, according to Reuters. UNICEF presented the report at the German parliament together with the report on Roma in Germany, prepared by Berlin's Technical University. That study found there are some 50,000 Roma from the former Yugoslavia living in Germany on refugee status who are not eligible for integration and language courses because they don't have official papers. "Roma children should be given the chance to break up the vicious cycle of poverty, discrimination and prejudices," said Reinhart Schlagintweit, head of UNICEF Germany in a statement on Monday. He warned of the "dramatic consequences" when "hundreds of thousands of children around the world grow up in ghettoes, without educational perspectives in the heart of Europe." At the same time another UNICEF report shows that the percentage of Roma children at school age, but not attending school, are 60-80 percent in Bulgaria, Albania and Romania, while it has been reduced to 20 percent in Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to AFP. C 2007 EUobserver ---------------------------- Vali "Noble blood is an accident of fortune; noble actions are the chief mark of greatness." (Carlo Goldoni) "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." (Jimi Hendrix)
