MISKOLC, HUNGARY, May 7, 2006: For the Gypsies of Eastern Europe, like Agnes Krappai, life never seems to improve. She lives in an impoverished section of this Hungarian town, in a house with no running water. But now, some leaders of the Gypsies, or Roma, are looking to a new model to try to achieve equality: the civil rights struggle of Black Americans. More and more, the Roma are going to court to secure their rights, and doing so where they think it will have the best chance for success–among the new East European members of the European Union and those trying to join, which are seeking to impress Western Europe with strict interpretations of their new antidiscrimination laws. The Roma strategy was rewarded in October, when a Bulgarian court for the Sofia district ruled for them in a school segregation case. “This is Brown v. Board of Education in Europe,” said Dimitrina Petrova, executive director of the European Roma Rights Center, recalling the 1954 Supreme Court decision that the official system of “separate but equal” school segregation by race was unconstitutional. “This is a purely American paradigm,” said Ms. Petrova, whose group filed the suit following the legal tactics of the American civil rights movement for Blacks in the 1950s and 60s. “It’s not a right if you can’t defend it in a court.”
An appeal is under way, but the Bulgarian government has already begun enacting changes in state education policy, and the Romani Baht Foundation, the Bulgarian rights group that argued the case, said it planned about 50 more school segregation cases in the fall. In 2002, the foundation filed suit against a coffee shop in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, for refusing to serve Roma. The foundation won, and has since filed suits against nightclub owners, hospitals and other companies, charging that they refuse to hire or serve Roma. Roma migrated from India to Europe up to 1,000 years ago, bringing nomadic ways, dark skin, their own language, insular culture and different customs that paved the way for permanent marginalization. Much remains unclear about the Roma. There is no agreement even on their numbers in Europe. Estimates range from 7 million to 15 million, and 5 percent to 10 percent of the population in many Eastern European countries.