Liberec, North Bohemia, March 8 (CTK) – The Liberec Region will not send a report on the state of its Roma minority to the Government Office as its methodological instructions are inhumane, deputy regional governor for social affairs Ivan Langr (Change for Liberec) told journalists yesterday.
The report has been serving as a basis for a national report for years.
Langr asked the human rights minister and ombudsman to adopt a stance on it.
“We want to be assured whether it is really acceptable to base monitoring documents of a similar type on anthropology and on a generalisation of social patterns,” Langr said.
“We want to know whether all of this is in accordance with the official human rights policy in the Czech Republic,” he added.
Langr said he was opposed to the remarks in the methodology he had sent to the media.
Langr said they advised social workers, civil servants, school principals and teachers to identify members of the Roma ethnic group “on the basis of real or imaginary (anthropological, cultural and social) indicators.”
Langr said he was of the view that the government officials incited to create one’s own sample of visible physical signs to determine who is a Romany.
Such results should be recorded in official statistics.
“We cannot create any false statistics of members of a minority according to some imaginary visible features, generalised patterns of behaviour of social habits and to push those who may be consistent with this into a category they themselves refuse,” Langr said.
He mentioned a Soviet film on the war in which an SS member examined the prisoners of war to determine who is of Jewish origin according to their faces and noses.
