European states are failing to protect their Roma communities, many of whom live in precarious conditions and are the victims of hate crimes sometimes perpetrated by police, Amnesty International warned today.
In a report coinciding with International Roma Day, the rights group said many of the 10 to 12 million Roma living in Europe face "the daily threat of forced eviction, police harassment and violent attacks".
"The conditions in which many Roma are forced to live are a damning indictment of years of official neglect and discrimination," the group said.
"Far from acknowledging that this situation is a result of their failure to ensure the human rights of the Roma, some European leaders are choosing to blame Roma themselves for 'failing to integrate'," it added.
The Roma, a traditionally nomadic people whose ancestors left India centuries ago, have long suffered from discrimination.
They were killed in their hundreds of thousands by the Nazis during World War II, alongside Jews and homosexuals.
Discrimination continues today as some countries blame Roma for a rise in petty crime.
In Greece, for instance, Amnesty blamed law enforcement for failing to intervene to stop racially motivated attacks, discouraging victims from filing complaints and failing to probe or effectively investigate complaints that are lodged.
"In many cases police officers themselves are perpetrators of hate crime," it said.
Greece is home to between 250,000 and 350,000 Roma, the rights group said.
According to official statistics, police conducted some 1,130 operations in Roma settlements across the country during the first nine months of last year.
Officers checked more than 52,400 people during those operations and more than 19,000 were taken to police stations. Of those, 1,305 were arrested.
"Following its visit to Greece, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention expressed its concern over the rounding up of members of the Romani community who were released soon after without charge," the report said.
France, meanwhile, pursues a controversial policy of forcibly evicting Roma from their camps, often paying them to return to their countries of origin, mainly Romania and Bulgaria.
