Empowerment of Roma to Fight Rights Deprivation

There was a lack of continuity and follow-up in some areas of project work, most notably anti-discrimination advocacy in Central and Southern Europe. This suggests that the project tried to include too many elements within a single human rights project with limited resources.

It proved difficult to combine litigation and advocacy in one Roma project. In principle, both are needed in Central and Southern Europe and are mutually supportive. In practice, the difficulty of predicting the timetable for, and duration of, the legal process, makes it hard to fit the litigation process into the parameters of a conventional human rights project.

The project focused on individual youth activists from Central and Southern Europe as the primary unit for capacity development, rather than focusing on Roma NGOs first, and youth working with them, secondly. Such an approach would have increased the probability of the organization retaining the benefits of the capacity development support provided.

The grantee worked with individual youth trainees so that they could apply in practice what had been learned. This was an important innovation in terms of human rights training which often focus on short term training. However more personnel and resources were required to make this aspect of individual capacity development fully effective.

While collaboration with local experts in regional human rights project was crucial for local and contextual knowledge relevant to Roma communities from Central and Southern Europe, the grantee needed to ensure continuous professional support to address the potential lack of experience with the application of international legal instruments and anti-discrimination legislation to take on such cases after the project closed.

The grantee cooperated with several national human rights NGOs, and, through its partner, recruited local lawyers and local researchers from Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia, and Romania with appropriate commitment and expertise. The use of recognised expertise was effective.

The project allowed the grantee to introduce and test a new methodology for involving youth in the sphere of international advocacy on behalf of the Roma population in Central and Southern Europe, while maintaining its already established role in strategic litigation. The project had an impact on the youth involved. Its longer-term impact is harder to assess, as is the case in most human rights projects. Impact is often the result of a combination of events and actions, legal changes and court judgments, along attitudinal shifts on the part of decision-makers, opinion-leaders, the mass media and the public-at-large.