discrimination

From the COE HR Commisioner's report On the Human Rights Situation of the Roma, Sinti and Travellers in Europe (2006)

On the basis of the Race Relations Act, the United Kingdom adopted a decree in 2001 ordering the immigration authorities to subject certain persons to “more rigorous examination than others in the same circumstances” on the basis of their nationality or ethnicity. The decree includes, in an annex, a list of such groups, among them the Roma. An immigration officer may, by reason of that person’s ethnic or national origin, detain the person pending his examination, decline to give the person’s notice of grant or refusal of leave to enter, and impose a condition or restriction on the person’s leave to enter the United Kingdom or on his temporary admission to the United Kingdom. Moreover, when the person is outside the United Kingdom, an immigration officer or the State Secretary may, by reason of that person’s ethnic or national origin, decline to give or refuse the person leave to enter before he arrives in the UK. This decree, which subjects persons to differentiated treatment solely on the basis of their nationality or ethnicity, is clearly in breach of the fundamental principle of non-discrimination and equality before the law, and should therefore be amended.

Why should we be told to remember terrible things? Surely those are the very things we want to forget. I wonder if it is not really remembrance that is important, but understanding and acknowledgment. Perhaps if we - as individuals, or as a culture - could finally understand and acknowledge the terrible things that 'we' have done, then we might be allowed to lay them to rest, even to forget. I would almost say that then we would be well advised to put them aside, because only in that way could We - the human race - move on.

But with the holocaust I would not say that we are anywhere near the stage of understanding and acknowledgment. There must have been hundreds of thousands of words - millions - spoken or written about the horrors that were carried out, and yet there are enormous areas where we simply fail to see.

The first of these concerns the ease with which any one of us could become - and does become - an accomplice in terrible crimes, simply by not being aware of our own role, or not wanting to be aware of that role. We blame Hitler for what happened - just as we blame Stalin for the crimes in Russia and Saddam for the crimes in Iraq. We think that wiping out the man wipes out the possibility of the crime. We do not see what happens all around us every day.

The second blind spot in our understanding is easier to identify; in theory it is easier to rectify; and for those reasons it is both more terrifying and more deeply shaming that 'we' have managed to do neither. We have not recognised, we have hardly even acknowledged, and we have done nothing to compensate the victims - if that were ever possible - or to prevent them from becoming victims all over again of exactly the same hatred and blind prejudice that drove the nazi killers.

How many people today are aware that the single ethnic group which, in proportion to its population, probably lost more victims than any other was not actually the Jews - it was the Roma? And how many people today would put their hands on their hearts and say that they were deeply pained and shocked that people could behave towards them in that way? As pained, if you like, and as determined to remember it for ever, as they would be had the answer been that it was the British, or the French or the Russians (and here you can fill in your own favourite ethnic group)?

The shocking tragedy for those Roma who died as well as for those who miraculously survived, is that their suffering has not just been forgotten by humanity, it has been deliberately forgotten.