Anti-Romani discrimination in Britain

Anti-Romani sentiment (also antigypsyism, anti-Romanyism, Romaphobia, or Antiziganism) is hostility, prejudice, discrimination or racism which is specifically directed at Romani people (Roma, Sinti, Iberian Kale, Welsh Kale, Finnish Kale, Horahane Roma, and Romanichal). Non-Romani itinerant groups in Europe such as the Yenish, Irish and Highland Travellers are often given the name "gypsy" and confused with the Romani people. As a result, sentiments which were originally directed at the Romani people are also directed at other traveler groups and they are often referred to as "antigypsy" sentiments.

The term ''Antigypsyism'' is recognized by the European Parliament and the European Commission as well as by a wide cross-section of civil society.

Etymology

In the Romani language, ''Rom'' is a masculine noun, meaning 'man of the Roma ethnic group' or 'man, husband', with the plural ''Roma''. However, in most cases, in other languages ''Rom'' is now used for people of all genders.

History

In the Middle Ages

In the early 13th-century Byzantine records, the ''Atsínganoi'' are mentioned as "wizards ... who are inspired satanically and pretend to predict the unknown".

Enslavement of Roma, mostly taken as prisoners of war, in the Danubian Principalities is first documented in the late 15th century. In these countries extensive legislation was developed that classified Roma into different groups, according to their tasks as slaves.

By the 16th century, many Romani who lived in Eastern and Central Europe worked as musicians, metal craftsmen, and soldiers. As the Ottoman Empire expanded, it relegated the Romani, who were seen as having "no visible permanent professional affiliation", to the lowest rung of the social ladder.

The Dacianos

The Dacianos formed the mythical group of European wanderers, said to be a caste of the Romani. They purportedly specialised in child-stealing and the manufacture of human freaks. They are also referred to as a criminal society that lasted until the 18th century, maiming children so they could be sold as professional beggars. The Dacianos are cited to have inhabited parts of Spain for several hundred years. The term itself used to be, along with ''gitanos'', a Spanish name for Roma. They were also identified as the ''Comprachicos'' or ''Comprapequeños'' (meaning "boy-buyers") in Victor Hugo's ''The Man Who Laughs''. Hugo claimed that traces of this group can be found in the penal laws passed by Spanish and English governments. The origin of their name is allegedly linked to the ancient region of Dacia, a former kingdom and posteriorly a Roman province.

16th and 17th centuries

In Royal Hungary in the 16th century at the time of the Turkish occupation, the Crown developed strong anti-Romani policies, since these people were considered suspect as possible Turkish spies or as a fifth column. In this atmosphere, they were expelled from many locations and increasingly adopted a nomadic way of life.

The first anti-Romani legislation was issued in the March of Moravia in 1538, and three years later, Ferdinand I ordered that Romani in his realm be expelled after a series of fires in Prague.

In 1545, the Diet of Augsburg declared that "whosoever kills a Gypsy (Romani), will be guilty of no murder". The subsequent massive killing spree which took place across the empire later prompted the government to step in to "forbid the drowning of Romani women and children".

In England, the Egyptians Act 1530 passed by the Crown in Parliament banned Romani from entering the country and required those living in the country to leave within 16 days. Failure to do so could result in confiscation of property, imprisonment and deportation. The act was amended with the Egyptians Act 1554, which directed that they abandon their "naughty, idle and ungodly life and company" and adopt a settled lifestyle. For those who failed to adhere to a sedentary existence, the Privy council interpreted the act to permit the execution of non-complying Romani "as a warning to others".

In 1660, the Romani were prohibited from residing in France by King Louis XIV.

18th century

In 1710, Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor, issued an edict against the Romani, ordering "that all adult males were to be hanged without trial, whereas women and young males were to be flogged and banished forever." In addition, in the kingdom of Bohemia, Romani men were to have their right ears cut off; in the March of Moravia, the left ear was to be cut off. In other parts of Austria, they would be branded on the back with a branding iron, representing the gallows. These mutilations enabled authorities to identify the individuals as Romani on their second arrest. The edict encouraged local officials to hunt down Romani in their areas by levying a fine of 100 Reichsthaler on those who failed to do so. Anyone who helped Romani was to be punished by doing forced labor for half a year. The result was mass killings of Romani across the Holy Roman empire. In 1721, Charles VI amended the decree to include the execution of adult female Romani, while children were "to be put in hospitals for education".

The Great Gypsy Round-up, also known as the "general imprisonment of the gypsies" (''prisión general de gitanos''), was a raid authorized and organized by the Spanish Monarchy in 1749, that led to the arrest of most gypsies (Romani) in the region. Although a majority were released after a few months, many others spent several years imprisoned and subject to forced labor. The raid was approved by the King Ferdinand VI of Spain. .

In 1774, Maria Theresa of Austria issued an edict forbidding marriages between Romani. When a Romani woman married a non-Romani, she had to produce proof of "industrious household service and familiarity with Catholic tenets", a male Rom "had to prove his ability to support a wife and children", and "Gypsy children over the age of five were to be taken away and brought up in non-Romani families."

In 2007 the Romanian government established a panel to study the 18th- and 19th-century period of Romani slavery by Princes, local landowners, and monasteries. This officially legalized practice was first documented in the 15th century. Slavery of Romani was outlawed in the Romanian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in around 1856.

19th century

Governments regularly cited petty theft committed by Romani as justification for regulating and persecuting them. In 1899, the ( ''Intelligence service for the security police concerning gypsies'') was set up in Munich under the direction of , and catalogued data on all Romani individuals throughout the German-speaking lands. It did not officially close down until 1970. The results were published in 1905 in Dillmann's ''Zigeuner-Buch'', which was used in the following years as justification for the Porajmos. It described the Romani people as a "plague" and a "menace", but almost exclusively characterized "Gypsy crime" as trespassing and the theft of food.

In the United States during Congressional debate in 1866 over the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which would subsequently grant citizenship to all persons born within U.S. territory, an objection raised was that a consequence of enacting the amendment would be to grant citizenship to Roma and other groups perceived by some as undesirable.

Pennsylvania Senator Edgar Cowan stated,

In response Senator John Conness of California observed,

Porajmos

Persecution of Romani people reached a peak during World War II in the Porajmos (literally, ''the devouring''), a descriptive neologism for the Nazi genocide of Romanis during the Holocaust. The Romani communities in Central and Eastern Europe were less organized than the Jewish communities; and the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads who travelled from village to village massacring the Romani inhabitants where they lived, typically left few to no records of the number of Roma killed in this way. Even though in a few cases significant documentary evidence of mass murder was generated, it is more difficult to assess the actual number of victims. Historians estimate that between 220,000 and 500,000 Romani were killed by the Germans and their collaborators—25% to over 50% of the slightly fewer than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time. More thorough research by Ian Hancock revealed the death toll to be at about 1.5 million.

Nazi racial ideology put Romani, Jewish, Slavic and Black people at the bottom of the racial scale.Simone Gigliotti, Berel Lang. ''The Holocaust: a reader''. Malden, Massachusetts, USA; Oxford, England, UK; Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Pp. 14. The German Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship, confiscated property and criminalized sexual relationships and marriage with Aryans. These laws were extended to Romani as Nazi policy towards Roma and Sinti was complicated by pseudo-historic racialist theories, which could be contradictory, namely that the Romani were of Egyptian ancestry. While they considered Romani grossly inferior, they believed the Roma people had some distant "Aryan" roots that had been corrupted. The Romani are actually a distinctly European people of considerable Northwestern Indian descent, or what is literally considered to be Aryan. Similarly to European Jews, specifically the Ashkenazi, the Romani people quickly acquired European genes via enslavement and intermarriage upon their arrival in Europe 1,000 years ago.

In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazi genocide of the Romani was so thorough that it exterminated the majority of Bohemian Romani speakers, eventually leading to the language's extinction in 1970 with the death of its last known speaker, Hana Šebková. In Denmark, Greece and a small number of other countries, resistance by the native population thwarted planned Nazi deportations and extermination of the Romani. In most conquered countries (e.g., the Baltic states), local cooperation with the Nazis expedited the murder of almost all local Romani. In Croatia, the Croatian collaborators of the Ustaše were so vicious only a minor remnant of Croatian Romani (and Jews) survived the killings.

In 1982, West Germany formally recognized that genocide had been committed against the Romani. Before this they had often claimed that, unlike Jews, Roma and Sinti were not targeted for racial reasons, but for "criminal" reasons, invoking antiziganist stereotype. In modern Holocaust scholarship the Porajmos has been increasingly recognized as a genocide committed simultaneously with the Shoah.

Catholic Church takes responsibility

On 12 March 2000, Pope John Paul II issued a formal public apology to, among other groups of people affected by Catholic persecution, the Romani people and begged God for forgiveness. On 2 June 2019, Pope Francis acknowledged during a meeting with members of the Romanian Romani community the Catholic Church's history of promoting "discrimination, segregation and mistreatment" against Romani people throughout the world, apologized, and asked the Romani people for forgiveness.

Contemporary antiziganism

A 2011 report issued by Amnesty International states, "systematic discrimination is taking place against up to 10 million Roma across Europe. The organization has documented the failures of governments across the continent to live up to their obligations."

Antiziganism has continued well into the 2000s, particularly in Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Kosovo. In Bulgaria, Professor Ognian Saparev has written articles stating that 'Gypsies' are culturally inclined towards theft and use their minority status to 'blackmail' the majority. European Union officials censured both the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 2007 for forcibly segregating Romani children from regular schools.

The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, has been an outspoken critic of antiziganism. In August 2008, Hammarberg noted that "today's rhetoric against the Roma is very similar to the one used by Nazi Germany before World War II. Once more, it is argued that the Roma are a threat to safety and public health. No distinction is made between a few criminals and the overwhelming majority of the Roma population. This is shameful and dangerous".

According to the latest Human Rights First Hate Crime Survey, Romanis routinely suffer assaults in city streets and other public places as they travel to and from homes and markets. In a number of serious cases of violence against them, attackers have also sought out whole families in their homes or whole communities in settlements predominantly housing Romanis. The widespread patterns of violence are sometimes directed both at causing immediate harm to Romanis, without distinction between adults, the elderly, and small children and physically eradicating the presence of Romani people in towns and cities in several European countries.

Public opinion

The extent of negative attitudes towards Romani people varies across different parts of Europe.

European Union

The practice of placing Romani students in segregated schools or classes remains widespread in countries across Europe. Many Romani children have been channeled into all-Romani schools that offer inferior quality education and are sometimes in poor physical condition or into segregated all-Romani or predominantly Romani classes within mixed schools. Many Romani children are sent to classes for pupils with learning disabilities. They are also sent to so-called "delinquent schools", with a variety of human rights abuses.

Romani in European cities are often accused of crimes such as pickpocketing. In 2009, a documentary by the BBC
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