#George kubes immigration lawyer tv
That was the situation when TV Nova's Na vlastni oci (With One's Own Eyes) broadcast a report on Romani emigres in Canada, portraying their life there as comfortable and free from prejudice. It sent a clear message which would be periodically repeated: "We do not want Roma here." Integration, it seems, was not high on the list. These proposals, along with Gina's support for measures aimed at reducing widespread racial segregation in schools and instituting job training programs for Roma, suggest that Roma leaders see integration as the path to follow.Īlthough this time Klaus supported the mini-office proposal, the citizenship law fiasco showed the Czech establishment's ideas to be somewhat different. At the time, there were no Romani representatives in the government. The Romani leader was serving on the state Council for Nationalities and Ethnic Minorities, which issued a report to the Cabinet in the fall of 1997 recommending further changes to the citizenship law and calling for a new government mini-office that would mediate between Roma and the state. Still, some - such as Ondrej Gina - have tried to facilitate change from within. A precedent had been set: if any change was to occur in Czech policy towards Roma, it would stem more from international pressure than any innate attempt at rectifying the situation. The Czech Government's handling of the situation was telling. US Senator Alfonse D'Amato, then chairman of the Congressional Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and CSCE Vice-Chairman Christopher Smith sent a letter calling the requirement of a clean political record "in effect, an ex post facto criminal penalty in violation of international human rights laws." Vaclav Klaus, Prime Minister at the time, countered by calling the letter "simplistic and inaccurate." His deputy foreign minister, Cyril Svoboda, told members of the Council of Europe that the government had no intentions of changing the law. However, the Council of Europe and even American lawmakers protested the clean criminal record requirement - the only one of its kind - which remained. Human rights groups, such as the Helsinki Committee, voiced their disapproval and to some degree were heard, since in 1996 amendments to the law loosened restrictions. The law inevitably drew international criticism and claims of discrimination. Many were left ping-ponging back and forth between the two new nations, stateless. Many Roma who had lived their entire lives in Bohemia and Moravia were excluded from Czech citizenship, and under the new Slovak laws didn't qualify for citizenship in that country either. The new law also required applicants to be fluent in Czech, to have had a single residency for two years and a clean criminal record for five.
The resulting citizenship law adapted an older internal citizenship law from 1969 in which ancestry and place of birth played an important role. Suddenly, there was a new issue of who belonged to whom. Of course, they were not called emigres until Czechoslovakia split up. Today's population is largely comprised of the descendants of these emigres. Other Roma came to the region for economic reasons. After the Second World War, Czechoslovakia resettled areas that had formerly belonged to Suedeten Germans, often with Roma from Slovakia. The issue can be traced back to the Holocaust, after which only about 600 Roma remained in what is today the Czech Republic. One that did was the question of citizenship for the 300,000 Roma living on the Czech side of the border. The split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia was hindered by relatively few issues, and even fewer issues lingered on after the separation was complete. The precedent-setting example came in 1993 with the Velvet Divorce. Czech public institutions have time and again taken measures to isolate the Romani population and resisted listening to voices of dissent. The incident typifies Czech-Roma relations of the past ten years. Some officials preferred to call the wall a "sound barrier." Several years later, in the spring of 1998, some of her fellow townspeople beat her to the punch when they announced plans to build a wall separating several apartment blocks occupied overwhelmingly by Roma from several houses with non-Roma residents across the street. Magdalena received a hearty ovation for her answer. The town to which she was referring was Usti nad Labem, and the dark-skinned people were Roma. "A public prosecutor," she replied, "so that I might cleanse our town of all the dark-skinned people." One of the questions the beauty pageant jury asked teenager Magdalena Babicka a few years ago was: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
#George kubes immigration lawyer series
Part one of a four-part series on minorities in Central Europe.
Czech-Roma relations after the Velvet Revolution
0 kommentar(er)
