Roma and Police â?? Promoting dialogue, mutual confidence and cooperation
Bucharest, 2007 November 15, Hotel Majestic
The PER Regional Center accepted with pleasure the invitation made by OSCE-ODIHR to participate to the field visit in comunities in which police interventions and conflicts between Roma and police were signaled. (ODIHR Report on field visit)
â?oRoma and Police â?? Promoting dialogue, mutual confidence and cooperationâ?? is an important issue, especially taking into account the fact that during the last two years police as well as some of the ethnic communities were involved more often in violent conflicts, phenomenon which we thought was left behind since 1995.
In the period of 1993 -1998, PER had several programs that aimed to improve the relation between police and Roma in Romania, the reports can be accessed at www.per-usa.org and www.per.org.ro. After 1995 PER noticed that police is making significant efforts in order to reform its activity, to handle also the aspects of police â?? multiethnic communities relations and that this process is ongoing ever since.
During 1993 â?? 1995 in several Roma communities violent acts occurred. The case analysis reveled that the non-implication of the police led to the escalation of the conflicts and to victims from the Roma communities.
It is somehow a paradox, that in the violent cases between Roma and police during the past two years, the case analyses shows that now some problems related to the intervention method of police, especially what concerns the excessive force use through which civil ethnic Roma persons, who were in fact not the target of the police intervention, ended up as victims of these interventions.
