France: Roma may file charges against Interior Minister for inciting hatred

The Romani community of France is considering filing charges against Interior Minister Manuel Valls for incitement of racial hatred after he was quoted in the right-wing paper Le Figaro as saying that Romani people who come to live in France "obviously do not want to integrate into society". The community accuses the minister of targeting Romani people on the basis of their ethnicity and race.

Criticism from Romani organizations

Valls told Le Figaro that the ministry’s experience with "integration villages" has shown that the vast majority of Romani people who come to France from other EU countries "don’t wish to integrate in France, either for cultural reasons, or because they are in the hands of Romani networks forcing them to beg or running prostitution rings." The minister therefore wants to continuing closing Romani campsites set up in the vicinity of impoverished neighborhoods and intends to deport back to their countries of origin all Romani people who do not meet the prerequisites for long-term residency in France.

"The situation has become unbearable, it cannot go on like this. The law must be enforced and these unhealthy Romani camps must be removed," Valls said.

Valls, a member of the Socialist Party, earned criticism from Romani organizations for his remarks. "He is attempting to make Romani people a scapegoat in the media. Not only is he targeting a minority on the basis of their ethnicity and race, which is illegal, but his words also legitimize the arguments made by racists and xenophobes," said Laurent el-Ghozi, founder of the Romeurope organization.

The activist group Roma Voice called the minister’s statements generalizations targeting the Romani community as a whole. "The words of Minister Valls are a very bad sign, they indicate that policy towards Romani people is hardening," Roma Voice wrote in its declaration.

12 000 people forcibly removed

"We estimate that there are about 20 000 Romani children, men and women, most of them from Bulgaria and Romania, living in our country illegally in more than 400 camps," Valls said in his interview for Le Figaro. According to the European Association for the Defense of Human Rights (AEDH), almost 12 000 (of those 20 000) Romani people were displaced from their camps in 2012, 80 % of them through the use of force. Approximately two-thirds of them were ousted during the second half of the year when the Socialists came to power.

Expulsions don’t work

Under pressure from the European Union and some of his colleagues in the Socialist government, Valls said last year that closure of the camps should not take place unless options for alternative housing were provided. However, according to the AEDH report, such options were made use of in only 15 of 63 cases.

Valls himself has acknowledged the expulsion policy doesn’t work, as the number of Romani people living in the camps is not falling.

France is providing free airline tickets and financial incentives to Romani people who are willing to be returned to their countries of origin, but their subsequent return to France cannot be prevented due to EU rules on freedom of movement.

News server Thelocal.fr reports that Minister Valls is justifying the forced evictions by saying the camps often pose a threat to the health of their occupants and can be dangerous when located near railway lines or roads. France has been criticized by the EU and UN for this policy, as well as by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International.