Category Archives: Roma, Gypsies and Travellers

Italy’s ‘Attenzione pickpocket!’ social media star found to have far-right links

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Monica Poli, a social media star for challenging petty thieves, is a councillor for Lega, which backs anti-Roma policies

Her bellowing cry – “Attenzione pickpocket!” – has turned her into a social media superstar, with videos featuring her crusade against petty crime racking up millions of views, spawning a trove of flattering news profiles and even a handful of dance tracks that riff on her signature catchphrase.

This week, however, it emerged that Monica Poli, TikTok’s celebrated citizen vigilante who publicly shames pickpockets by alerting tourists to their presence, is a councillor for Italy’s far-right Lega (League) party. Led by Matteo Salvini, the party has long been linked to draconian policies and incendiary rhetoric targeting asylum seekers, immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community.

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‘We need to get out!’ How Gypsy families were driven out of Spanish town by mob

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Many of the 40 people forced to flee after a local stabbing are still traumatised by Andalucían town’s ‘blackest day’

Almost 10 months on, Ricardo García Carmona still shudders at the way he spoke to his mother when she appeared on his doorstep with an urgent warning a little after 9am on Sunday 17 July last year. “She said: ‘Let’s go! We need to get out!’”

A few hours earlier, his mother told him, a young doorman called Álvaro Soto had been stabbed to death after an argument at the pub where he worked in the small Andalucían town of Peal de Becerro. The alleged killers, like García Carmona’s family, were members of Peal’s Gypsy community, and his mother could not shake the feeling that something terrible was about to happen.

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Romany leaders appeal for calm after second day of protest violence in Greece

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Outrage continues over police shooting of teenage boy, with clashes erupting in major urban centres

Romany leaders in Greece have appealed for calm following a second day of violent protests triggered by the police shooting of a teenage boy, who is in intensive care.

Outrage over the incident, which took place in Thessaloniki when the 16-year-old reportedly sped out of a petrol station without paying a €20 fuel bill, has resulted in thousands spilling on to the streets and clashes erupting in major urban centres.

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Thousands take to streets in Greece in protest over 2008 shooting of teenager

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Police tactics again in spotlight after shooting of Romany boy on eve of annual march for Alexis Grigoropoulos

Thousands of people have joined protests in Athens, Thessaloniki and other Greek cities to commemorate the fatal police shooting of a teenager, hours after violence erupted over a similar incident in the north of the country.

Police estimated more than 11,000 protesters had joined protests on Tuesday amid fears of renewed clashes as a Romany boy, shot in the head by an officer, fought for his life.

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Violent protests in Greece after Romany boy shot by police

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About 1,500 people take part in protest march in Thessaloniki with teenager in critical condition

Violent protests have broken out in Greece’s second-largest city over the police shooting of a Romany teenager after he allegedly filled his vehicle at a fuel station and drove off without paying.

The 16-year-old boy was being treated at a Thessaloniki hospital where he was in critical condition. The officer who allegedly shot him in the head was arrested and suspended from duty, police in the northern city said.

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Gypsies and Travellers fear missing out on energy bills support

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Government urged to ensure thousands living in park homes in Great Britain receive £400 payments

Gypsy and Traveller groups are calling on the government to ensure thousands of households living in park homes are not excluded from its energy bills support scheme this winter as bills soar.

The scheme will pay out a total of £400 to all households in Great Britain with a domestic electricity connection between October and March, with monthly payments administered by their energy supplier.

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Spanish Gypsy groups call for protection after families flee racist mob

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Killing of doorman in Andalucían town triggered rampage in which houses were burned and looted

Spanish Gypsy groups are calling for urgent action and protection after dozens of people were forced to abandon their homes in a small Andalucían town when a killing triggered a wave of racist violence.

In the early hours of Sunday 17 July, a 29-year-old pub doorman called Álvaro Soto was stabbed to death in Peal de Becerro after an argument with four members of the local Gypsy community. The alleged attackers were later arrested.

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‘They won’t accept us’: Roma refugees forced to camp at Prague train station

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Humanitarian crisis grows as Ukrainian Roma families stuck at Czech train station say they are not treated like other refugees

Prague’s central railway station seems a picture of normality amid warm spring sunshine and the return of legions of tourists, who had been largely absent at the height of Covid. On the platform one weekday morning, two German sightseers gaze curiously at the statue of Sir Nicholas Winton, the British stockbroker who helped 669 mostly Jewish children escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of the second world war.

Yet just yards away, hundreds of Roma people are sheltering in the only place available to them since they joined the millions of Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion.

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The shrimp returns: beloved flamenco singer Camarón stars in graphic novel

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Thirty years after his death, the rich life of the Spanish Gypsy singer is depicted through 10 illustrated episodes

In death, as in life, the legendary flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla continues to confound expectations, cross borders and demand that his blistered and blistering voice be heard.

The revered, beloved and sometimes controversial cantaor died of lung cancer in July 1992, aged just 41. But as the 30th anniversary of his death looms, the singer born José Monge Cruz is being reincarnated in the black-and-white pages of a new graphic novel intended as a homage to Camarón, the music he created and the comic book itself.

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Museum celebrates Barcelona’s disappearing Gypsy heritage

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Artefacts reflect joys and sorrows of a community persecuted in Spain since Catholic reconquest in 1492

It doesn’t look like a place of legend, but the narrow Carrer de la Cera is the birthplace of la rumba catalana, the infectiously rhythmic stepchild of flamenco created by Barcelona’s Gypsy community in the 1950s and popular today throughout the world.

Now the city’s gitanos have their own museum, a tiny, vibrant space on the Carrer de la Cera, which lies in the multicultural el Raval neighbourhood. The museum will open its doors on Sunday.

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‘You kind of die’: life without power in the Cañada Real, Spain

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Little has changed in Europe’s largest shantytown since the UN said the lack of electricity ‘violates children’s rights’ in 2020

Few parts of Europe’s largest shantytown speak quite as plainly of the past 12 months as Luisa Vargas’s sparse, tidy and dim front room.

A thin curtain hangs across a window cut into the wooden wall to admit a little light, the bookshelves bear the sooty scorches of candles, and a wood-burning stove squats near the door, its chimney punching through a damp scab of ceiling. A big TV sits forlorn and powerless, its place usurped by a portable model perched on a child’s chair and powered, in carefully rationed sessions, by a car battery.

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Illegally sterilised Czech women to be offered compensation

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Hundreds of mostly Roma women were threatened, tricked or bribed into being sterilised until 2012

Women sterilised without their consent are to be offered compensation in the Czech Republic after President Miloš Zeman signed a bill into law this week.

The women, most of whom were Roma, will be awarded 300,000 Czech crowns (£10,000) from the government as compensation.

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Marcus Rashford mural and Cuba protests: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Turkey to Colombia

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Mi Iubita Mon Amour review – touching debut from Noémie Merlant

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The Portrait of a Lady on Fire star has made a superbly low-key film about the ill-fated flirtations a teenager and older woman

Noémie Merlant is the French acting star who two years ago helped make Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire a colossal critical hit at Cannes. Now she provides one of the festival’s incidental pleasures with her engaging if flawed directorial feature debut, presented here as a special screening. She has written it with her co-star, the emerging Romany actor Gimi-Nicolae Novaci, whom she discovered and cast as a nonprofessional in Shakira, the short film she directed in 2019 about gypsy communities in Paris. There is a definite screen chemistry between them here, and at times Mi Iubita (Romany for “my love”) Mon Amour almost comes across like a straight Call Me By Your Name.

Related: The Souvenir Part II review – a flood of austere sunlight in Joanna Hogg’s superb sequel

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‘The police bill is wiping out a culture’: New Travellers take a stand

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If it becomes law, residing on land without permission would be a criminal offence, threatening a way of life for communities across the UK

“I am worried that not everyone knows what is coming,” says Amy, sitting in the truck she has turned into a cosy home for her and her two children. “If this bill is passed it will mean the end of our culture. The end of our way of life.”

Amy, who wanted to be known by her first name, lives with her two sons on a small Travellers’ site down a quiet country lane in the west of England, along the edges of an ancient forest.

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Malawi Pride and press freedoms in Palestine: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Chile to Cambodia

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Death of Romany man knelt on by Czech police must be ‘investigated urgently’

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Council of Europe and human rights groups demand answers after footage shows man being pinned to the ground

Human rights organisations are leading calls for an urgent investigation into the death of a Czech man who died after being restrained by police, after footage of the incident went viral on social media.

The neck restraint technique used during the arrest of a Romany man was “reckless, unnecessary and disproportionate, and therefore unlawful”, according to Amnesty International, who also called on the local authorities for an immediate, impartial investigation and a ban on coercive techniques that severely restrict breathing.

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Death of Romany man knelt on by Czech police compared to that of George Floyd

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Video footage challenges official claims that the cause of death was unrelated to man’s arrest

Video footage of a police officer kneeling on the neck of a Romany man who later died in an ambulance is being shared among Czechs on social media, leading many to compare his treatment to that of George Floyd.

The video, shot on 19 June, shows three police officers in Teplice, a town in the north of the Czech Republic, detaining a Romany man on the floor. As one officer holds the man’s feet, another appears to kneel on his neck, and a third tries to handcuff him. Voices of several Roma bystanders are heard in the video.

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‘I always wanted a girl’: scandal of Czech Roma forcibly sterilised

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Czech MPs to debate compensation bill for women as state refuses to acknowledge ‘attempted genocide’

Elena Gorolová was 21 when she gave birth to her second son. “The doctor told me I would need to deliver via a C-section otherwise I would be risking the health of me and the baby.”

In the delivery room, a nurse gave her papers to sign. “I was in so much pain … I was in no state to think about what I was signing,” says the social workerfrom the Czech Republic. She had unknowingly signed an agreement to be sterilised.

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Roma suffer under EU’s ‘environmental racism’, report concludes

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Thousands live in squalor due to policies of exclusion and deprivation, says study

Europe’s Roma communities are often living on polluted wastelands and lacking running water or sanitation in their homes as a result of “environmental racism”, a report has concluded.

The European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a pan-European network of green NGOs, found Roma communities were often excluded from basic services, such as piped drinking water, sanitation and rubbish collection, while frequently living at or near some of the dirtiest sites in Europe, such as landfills or contaminated industrial land.

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