Fundación Punjab

By Paul LeGendre
Director
Human Rights First's Fighting Discrimination Program
 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/human-rights-first/the-hungarian-government_b_255713.html

A few days ago, on August 2, 2009, a Roma woman, 45, was shot dead, and her
daughter, 13, seriously injured in an overnight attack of their home in
Kisleta, Hungary. The woman's daughter is suffering life-threatening
injuries. This tragedy does not appear to be an isolated incident, but
rather one more in a long string of violent attacks against the Roma
community in Hungary.

Human Rights First has called on the Hungarian authorities to undertake a
thorough investigation into this latest murder and to consider the
possibility that it may have been a hate crime. We deplore that in Hungary
over the last two years, there has been an apparent rise in the incidence of
violent acts against Roma - including murders, shootings, arson attacks, and
other forms of violence - that in many cases appear to be motivated by bias
against the victim's ethnicity.

To name but a few other incidents: on April 22, 54-year-old Jeno Koka was
shot in the chest outside his home in Tiszalök. On February 23, the home of
a Romani family was firebombed in Tatárszentgyörgy, resulting in the tragic
death of Robert Csorba and his 5-year-old son--both shot as they tried to
escape the burning house.

Although the most serious crimes are reported by the media, many cases of
such violent attacks often go unreported and/or undocumented. Instances of
police ill-treatment and discrimination--recognized by the European
Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) as problematic in
Hungary--contribute to the high levels of distrust of authorities among Roma
communities, and thus to the severe underreporting of racist and other
violent acts. The feeling of distrust is all the more confirmed in a recent
survey published in 2009 by the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency
across 27 EU countries where 18% of all the Roma surveyed considered that
they were a victim of a racially-motivated assault, threat or serious
harassment in the previous 12 months. The Survey suggests that given that
the overwhelming majority of Roma respondents indicated they did not report
their victimization, one can assume that the level of officially recorded
racist crime significantly undercounts the real extent of the problem."

Violence against Roma in Hungary is occurring against a backdrop of
widespread marginalization of Roma communities, discrimination, and
anti-Roma rhetoric expressed by some public officials. The rise of
right-wing groups that espouse racist, antisemitic, and xenophobic views is
another major concern because their rhetoric and actions have contributed to
a climate of animosity toward certain minority groups, the Roma principal
among them.

Hungarian authorities have taken some very important steps. Among other
actions, senior political leaders have publicly spoken out against the most
serious cases of anti-Roma violence, and the government has committed
significant law enforcement resources to investigations of some of these
cases and has sought out expertise from the United States Federal Bureau of
Investigation in these cases. Hungarian law enforcement personnel have also
taken part in training in combating violent hate crimes provided by the
OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.

But efforts need to be increased. If hate crimes are on the rise, then
governments must make more efforts. Here are three things the Hungarian
government should do now:

1. End the general climate of impunity for these attacks. The importance of
a thorough investigation and prosecution of violent attacks against Roma -
particularly where racism may have been a motivating factor - has been
highlighted in several cases of the European Court for Human Rights. We call
on the law enforcement authorities to ensure the swift identification and
prosecution of the perpetrators. They should also ensure that racist and
other bias motivations are duly identified and registered and that
prosecutors press charges accordingly.

2. Improve monitoring systems. Programs should be set up to train law
enforcement officials to respond promptly to suspected hate crimes and
record evidence of bias motivations, in order to bring evidence before the
courts. At present there is no effective system for collecting data on
violent hate crimes, or that permits even the identification of the
ethnicity of the victim of a crime. This impedes policymakers from seeing
and understanding the full scope of the problem. In fact, according to the
European Union Fundamental Rights Agency, which assesses the criminal
justice data collection systems among EU member states, Hungary is in a
lower tier of countries that collect and makes available only limited data
on racist violence and crime.

3. Enhance the legislative framework. Article 174(B) of the Hungarian
criminal code, which does allow for certain violent crimes committed with a
bias motivation to be prosecuted as a separate offense, is rarely used.
Furthermore, the Hungarian criminal code does not expressly allow for bias
motivations to be considered as an aggravating factor in sentencing in other
crimes of violence such as murder, contrary to the requirements of the
recently adopted EU Framework Decision on Racism and Xenophobia and to
longstanding Council of Europe recommendations.