Thread: In E.U. Roma Policy Clash, Many Get a Bruising

In E.U. Roma Policy Clash, Many Get a Bruising

By STEPHEN CASTLE
Published: September 17, 2010

BRUSSELS — Once again, it’s all about Nicolas Sarkozy.

In the aftermath of the worst-tempered gathering of European Union leaders in recent years, the bloc’s officials are calculating the fallout from an extraordinary display of pyrotechnics by the French president.

Aggressive, outspoken and selective in his use of facts, Mr. Sarkozy deployed attack as the best form of defense against charges that French deportations of Roma breached European law.

In doing so Mr. Sarkozy put his accuser — the European Commission — on the defensive, deftly exposing how few European leaders will come out to support the bloc’s executive arm when it is under fire.

In the process, however, Mr. Sarkozy derailed a summit meeting of E.U. leaders, transforming what was supposed to have been a cerebral discussion of European foreign policy into a public display of mudslinging and European divisions.

As France prepares to take the presidency of the Group of 20, the temperament of the French president is back in the spotlight.

Some officials now say they could see a train wreck looming as soon as they read the words uttered on Tuesday by Viviane Reding, the E.U. justice commissioner. Ms. Reding found that assurances from French ministers about their policies on the Roma were contradicted by the leak of an official circular showing that the ethnic group had been specifically singled out by the French government — in direct contradiction to E.U. law.

Angry that she had been misled, Ms. Reding was unusually blunt in her public response. Though she won support at the time, she overplayed her hand by referring to “a situation that I had thought that Europe would not have to witness again after the Second World War.â€

US commission denounces France's Roma evictions

(AFP)

WASHINGTON — An independent US commission of elected officials that monitors human rights in Europe denounced Wednesday the controversial forced deportations of Roma from France to Romania and Bulgaria.

"The situation of Roma in Europe will not be fixed by playing a shell game with them," said Florida Democratic representative Alcee Hastings, co-chairman of from the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission.

"I perceive such actions as wrong-headed political maneuvers, particularly the discriminatory policy of targeting Roma for expulsion," Hastings added, saying that France and other countries "should focus on integrating Roma where they are."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his administration have been under fire for weeks, and now face possible legal action from the European Union for a policy of deporting members of the traveling communities.

The French government has in recent months expelled thousands of Roma, whom the government accuses of acts of criminality, including aggressive begging and theft.

"Minority communities are part of a larger fabric of society and we are all put at risk when those who seek to divide for political gain are allowed to take the lead," Hastings said in commission statement to Congress, at a hearing on the situation facing minorities in France.

French Ambassador Pierre Vimont insisted to US lawmakers however that there was "nothing like a collective action against this so called community," referring to the Roma.

The French government, he said, was "taking measures against individual citizens that are creating a problem relating mostly to public order."

France has charged that one in five thefts in the Paris area was carried out by a citizen of Romania, noting that many Romanians in Paris are from the Roma minority.

France has deported some 1,000 Roma migrants to Bulgaria and Romania since last month, and more than 8,000 Roma have been deported since the beginning of the year, after 9,875 were expelled in 2009.

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