Court ruling sparks fight against Roma education discrimination

(PRAGUE) - The Czech Republic's condemnation by the European Union's human rights watchdog for discrimination against the Roma minority in its schools has relaunched moves this week to win them a better education deal across Central and Eastern Europe.

The pan-European body's Court of Human Rights ruled that 18 children from the eastern city of Ostrava were subjected to "discriminatory treatment" on "the basis of their Roma origins" when they were sent to "special" schools.

The ruling is "a legal equivalent of an earthquake, its reverberations will be felt for years," according to James Goldston, a New York lawyer working for The Open Society foundation's Justice Initiative, which seeks legal means to boost human rights.

By 13 votes to four, the court concluded on Tuesday that article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which bans all forms of discrimination, was violated, and ordered 14,000 euros (20,500 dollars) in damages and costs to each child.

The court, based in Strasbourg, France, noted that the Czech Republic is not alone in this practice and that discriminatory barriers to education for Roma children exist in a number of European countries.

While recognising Czech government efforts to remedy the situation, the ruling underlined "the disproportionately high number" of Roma children sent to "special schools" reserved for those with learning problems and unable to follow a normal education.

In the Czech Republic, more than one Roma child in two is directed towards such schools and the chances of finding one of them there is 27 times higher than for any other child, according to figures from the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC).

The court, which accepted non-official figures provided by the complainants, also expressed doubts about the tests used to stream children to such institutions and said that parental consent was not a sufficient safeguard.

"This is a major step forward in Europe's fight against discrimination," said ERRC director Vera Egenberger during a news conference in Prague held to "give the widest possible publicity to this historic judgement."

For Goldston, the ruling is decisive because "it clearly states that Roma children should have the same access to quality education as others," adding that "other European states" faces the same problems in living up to that challenge as the Czechs.

"Physical separation" of Roma children in schools exists above all in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, either through special schools, separate classes, or majority Roma "ghetto schools," according to the ERCC.

In Slovakia, more than half of Roma children are "erroneously" educated in remedial special schools, according to a report published by Amnesty International this week in Bratislava. Only 3.0 percent of Roma children get a secondary education and 0.3 percent a university degree, it added.

Moreover, the plight of Slovakia's significant Roma population has worsened since the fall of communism in 1989 with the number of children receiving nursery education crashing from 166,852 to 1,180 between 1988 and 1995 and the drop out rate in primary schools rising from 46.0 percent to 63.0 percent between 1976 and 1999, according to the international human rights watchdog.

For Marketa Mikova, one of the Czech complainants at Strasbourg, the court judgement is "a massive victory." Although Julius, the eldest child at the origin of her complaint, now aged 19 and unemployed, is too old to benefit, her youngest six-year-old son "still has every chance" of doing so.