Project has been started with an awareness raising campaign among the local Roma. A booklet “minority rights” was produced as training and awareness-raising tool consisting basic information about the project activities, people responsible for their implementation and ground standards of minority human rights proclaimed by the United Nations declaration on minorities, FCNM, ECHR and the Bulgarian legal act against discrimination. The information presented were simplified aiming to avoid complicated and hard to understand legalistic language, thus to be readable and close to the beneficiaries of the booklet – the local Roma. Although written on readable language the booklet was prepared using methodology and theoretical constructions used by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and leading human rights defending NGOs. The booklet also contains number of examples explaining the commentaries made to different legal acts. 1 000 booklets was distributed in seven habitats of the Municipality of Polski Trambesh by the local Roma mediators. Local Roma welcomes the booklet initiative very kindly and warmly and was indeed fascinated to learn about their minority human rights – aimed to create equal opportunities in their interaction with the mainstream society and to preserve their identity.

Starting the monitoring process on human rights situation in the Roma communities’ vast number of signals by the alleged Roma victims was collected by the organization.  Every case has been researched thoroughly by a legal professional and based on the collected information the most suitable approach to redress the each particular case of Roma rights violation was chosen– litigation, reconciliation or administrative procedure.

Using reconciliation approach were successfully redressed more than 35 cases of conflicts between the local administrative authorities and officials and local Roma. This to be the cases of Roma minority rights violations related with non compliance of local administrative authorities with the legally based procedures. Reconciliation proves to be the fastest way in addressing local Roma problems. This approach examines the underlying causes of the problem and looks at what solutions best suit the unique circumstances of the case and satisfies victims’ interests. In a small community where local Roma have to continue to deal with the local officials and representatives of governmental structures cooperatively, reconciliation is a more appropriate procedure then going to court that can divide people and increase hostility. Reconciliation creates opportunities to continue relationship between the alleged violator and the victim, it helps end the problem, not the relationship. It is a quick process; agreement between the parties may be obtained in a couple of hours or in several sessions during a week. It can be conducted by a non judiciary person with minimum supervision by judiciary needed.  

Administrative litigation is an approach that can be used only when enough proofs about minority rights violations are discovered. Minority rights violations that often occurs, such as slander and ill language by the officials, towards local Roma are not manifested in public, they happens in a close environment (officials offices) where only alleged violator and alleged victim presence. Thus it is very difficult to prove such a violation based only on the words of alleged victim. As a advantage of administrative litigation from the court litigation can be showed that, as a pre-judicially procedure, it binds the parties with “res judicata” as well as court litigation decision (Administrative litigation decision came in to power if it hasn’t been appealed in front of the court in a given period of time) but it doesn’t need the court litigation time to prepare the case and to promote the decision so it is several times faster. As an example court litigation usually takes two or three months at least, before first hearing on the case is conducted. And very often a trial takes more then one year until reaching the court decision. Administrative litigation with thorough investigation on the facts is likely to be not appealed by the party that is proven to be a minority rights violator, thus administrative litigation gives to the victim same protection as a court trial but in a timely manner. However this approach major shortcoming is that the administrative organ that conducts fact investigation on the case is not completely independent and a pressure from the administration that allegedly violated minority rights or other parties of the executive power can easily occur.

Court litigation approach wasn’t used in redressing violated minority rights of the local Roma due to unwillingness of the local Roma to wait a long period of time for the court decision. The typology of the problems determines urgent actions to be made in redressing them, even the administrative litigations that ends with a decision within several weeks seems to be too slow for the local Roma. Thus the administrative litigation approach was chosen only when a strong confrontation between the alleged violator and victim occurs and both parties refused to use reconciliation approach.

Roma Rights Monitoring project has been renewed for additional 12 months starting from February 2009. More information about this cycle of project implementation will be available as an interim report on the Download section of the web page soon.