Czech senator proposes segregating Romani children in the schools, Commissioner for Romani Affairs objects to such apartheid and open racism

“As for segregated schools. All children have to be together. Romani, Czech, etc. It’s a beautiful idea. In reality, it cannot be implemented, because we would be harming those children who are unaccustomed to a certain ethnicity. On the contrary, maybe if separate classes were made for the Romani children we would be building their equal opportunities for the future. It’s not discrimination, on the contrary, it’s a simply totally rational step,” the senator said in her speech during the discussion of expanding the powers of the Public Defender of Rights to combat discrimination.

Lucie Fuková: Segregation limits educational success

Czech Government Commissioner for Romani Minority Affairs Lucie Fuková has objected to the senator’s remarks. “A quality education is the most basic instrument for aiding children from all social and ethnic groups in society to succeed. Segregation limits educational success, on the contrary, it introduces enormous economic costs for the state, the regions and municipalities. The remark by Senator Hamplová contravenes all European values and just confirms how important such education is,” she told Romea.cz.

Czech Government Human Rights Commissioner Klára Šimáčková Laurenčíková told the Czech News Agency (ČTK) that it is unacceptable for politicians to make racist remarks. It is also unacceptable to separate children from each other on the basis of their affiliation with any minority group.

“We have to oppose such statements vigorously, to clearly distance ourselves from them. It is absolutely unacceptable for racist remarks to be made anywhere, and it is especially unacceptable during a plenary session of a public institution by political representatives. Madame Senator’s remarks not only show a basic incomprehension of the causes and context of inequality in the Czech education system, they also express an attitude that does not belong in a democratic society, let alone coming from the floor of such a place of representativeness as is the Czech Senate,” the Human Rights Commissioner told ČTK.

The Human Rights Commissioner called the senator’s remarks “openly racist rhetoric”. She also said that taking a different approach towards education based on children’s affiliation with any minority group would be unacceptable.

What is necessary, according to the Human Rights Commissioner, is to eliminate inequality. She considers the only functional approach to be cooperation between the education, health care and social systems that augment support for housing and services to aid families with school-aged children.

The Human Rights Commissioner also mentioned support during crises and complicated life situations, as well as developing parents’ skills. There is already a team of experts from academic fields, the Education Ministry, the Health Ministry, the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, and NGOs addressing the problem of Romani children’s segregation in the schools.

The experts in that group met for the first time on Wednesday, 29 March with ministerial representatives. “They are designing comprehensive measures to address the subject of Romani children and socially disadvantaged children being segregated and will propose them to the Government in roughly six months,” the Czech Government Human Rights Commissioner said in a Facebook post featuring photos from her meeting with representatives from the Contact Point for Roma and Sinti Issues of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Manager of ROMEA’s Romani Scholarship program says the senator’s remarks are racist, unacceptable and unethical

According to Štefan Balog, manager of the ROMEA organization’s Romani scholarship program, the remarks of the senator are absolutely unacceptable and unethical. “We condemn these remarks and thoroughly reject any form of racial segregation in education. The experience of many Romani students shows that unequal educational environments still exist here, but thanks to scholarship programs such as the one implemented by ROMEA, we are succeeding to gradually change things for the better,” he told news server Romea.cz.

“Our scholarship recipients who are studying in secondary schools or at universities frequently encounter disbelief in their abilities from teachers, disbelief in their potential to study at anything more than the primary level of education. Senator Zwyrtek Hamplová, moreover, would like to restore segregational practices as lawful tools. That directly contravenes what people from the majority society have been calling for as well as the Roma themselves in particular,” Balog said.

“This approach of racism and segregation is the exact opposite of what the ROMEA Romani Scholarship program has been doing its best to achieve, not just by supporting those in need, but also, for example, by holding motivational discussions in the socially excluded localities. Madame Senator’s absurd, stupid remarks should only be taken seriously if we want to regress by 50 years,” Balog said.

Romani students: Meeting our non-Romani peers enriches us all

Romani students themselves also protested the remarks made by the senator. “I reject Ms. Hamplová’s allegations. Separating children from each other on the basis of the color of their skin will create even more inequality. Meeting our non-Romani peers enriches us all, thanks to our different experiences we frequently have different perspectives on things,” said Pavel Banda, a student at Mendel University in Brno, where he is studying economics and management.

“We must be returning to the 1970s. How can anybody even come up with such an idea? We are living in modern times, doing our best to achieve equality, not segregation. We learn from each other, we accept new customs and traditions. The saddest thing is that an educated person made this remark,” said Štefan Feri, a student at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem.

Romani activist Jaroslav Miko: Dangerous, fascist remarks

Romani activist Jaroslav Miko called the senator’s remarks dangerous and fascist. “What would our Czech society look like, how would the coexistence of the majority and the minority work if we were to teach Czech children that they are not all equal and that the color of their skin decides where they will be included? We would deprive these children of the opportunity to establish friendships, to get to know each other, and personal experience is the best medicine for breaking down mutual prejudices and mistrust,” Miko told Romea.cz.

According to Miko, such remarks radicalize Czech society and threaten the healthy development of children. “It is high time we consider to what degree immunity from prosecution should apply to the political remarks made on the floor of the Czech Parliament, as one day we might even live to see such remarks increase along with the number of politicians who think in such fascist terms, like the case of this Sládek-in-a-skirt named Hamplová. Immunity from prosecution for political statements cannot serve to spread racism and hatred with impunity. This has nothing to do with political opinion,” Miko said to news server Romea.cz.

Balážová: Separate little classes for different ethnicities? What comes next?

According to journalist Jarmila Balážová, Senator Hamplová is once again scoring cheap political points without any knowledge of the subject and is willing to go as far as she can since she is aware of her political immunity from prosecution. “Separate little classes of this kind would be for Roma today, for children with different handicaps – but what about the day after tomorrow? I don’t understand why this didn’t immediately provoke a reaction from the other senators and I hope they will respond, just as I hope there will be radical condemnation of this from other politicians. On the other hand, I am afraid of how the children and students of Romani origin who belong in separate classes, according to Ms. Hamplová, must be feeling right now,” she said.

Michal Miko: Discipline this senator, this is institutional racism

The director of the RomanoNet organization said the Czech Republic has been failing to educate Romani children equally since at least the year 2006. “Their incompetence when it comes to implementing the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of D.H. and Others gives room to populists like Hamplová to create segregation and intolerance,” Michal Miko told news server Romea.cz.

“Senator Hamplová’s remarks on the floor of the Senate are just another consequence of the state’s unwillingness, specifically the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, to actively, structurally implement that judgment from the European Court of Human Rights. The Czech schools should be at a different level 17 years after that judgment was handed down, but unfortunately, the inclusion that should have been implemented after the amendment of the Act on Education in 2016 is debatable, because no proper changes or outcomes can be seen,” the RomanoNet director said.

“As civil society representatives we are asking the president of the Senate, RNDr. Miloš Vystrčil, to launch a disciplinary proceedings in this case against this display of institutional racism on the floor of such a democratic institution as is the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, that the Strategy for Roma Equality, Inclusion and Participation 2021-2030 be required reading for the senators, and that knowledge be shared so they will know what is actually meant to happen in the area of including Roma in the Czech Republic,” the RomanoNet director said.

Czech Interior Minister Vít Rakušan: Pure racism

The senator’s remarks, made in the context of the proposals for antidiscrimination norms from the EU, promoted criticism on social media. However, none of the other members of the upper house responded to her at the time.

Czech Senator Adéla Šípová (Pirates) later said drawing attention to remarks that cross the line just increases their reach. However, the “Mayors and Independents” (STAN) movement did respond to the remarks by saying they were unleashing hate.

“Senator Zwyrtek Hamplová doesn’t know what century she’s in and she might not even know what continent she’s on. She wants to introduce segregated classes just for Romani children. We would prefer people not be in the Senate who unleash hate and spread disinformation,” the movement stated.

The chair of the STAN movement, Czech Interior Minister Vít Rakušan, called her remarks racist. “What Senator Hamplová did in the Senate today is pure racism. Actually, it’s not even ‘pure’. It’s dirty hypocrisy, because the senator did not hesitate to shield herself by claiming racial segregation would be in the best interests of the children being segregated,” he tweeted.

Zdeněk Šarapatka, a publicist and former member of the board of public broadcaster Czech Television, also responded to the remarks, calling the senator a racist. “However much she cloaks her ‘ideas’ in a jumble of verbal ballast, her speech in the Senate has convicted her of racism,” he posted to Facebook.

“Racial segregation is a special case of political segregation, limiting in-person contact and coexistence between the members of different races. Hamplová would welcome that in the schools, though: Instead of diverse classes, she would love to see a ghetto of ‘gypsy’ schools so ‘our’ children wouldn’t have to grow accustomed to them,” Šarapatka said.

Since last year, Senator Zwyrtek Hamplová has represented a precinct of Kroměříž in the Senate. Although she ran as an independent, she closely collaborates with the “PRO” party of Jindřich Rajchl there.

Hamplová attended a recent demonstration where Rajchl announced there would be a blockade of Government buildings. During the COVID-19 pandemic, both lawyers (Zwyrtek Hamplová and Rajchl) became important opponents of the measures introduced to curtail the pandemic and a broader public became more aware of them.

Experts: 80 schools are mostly-Roma, segregation is a loss for everybody

In the Czech Republic there are almost 80 schools where most of the pupils are Romani children. As many as 20 schools are almost all-Roma.

That information comes from the dedicated server on desegregating education, Desegregace.cz, which is run by the PAQ Research agency. The server points out the impacts of segregated schools on children’s educational success, on public budgets, and on the development of the regions where they are located.

The findings are based on analyses, Government materials, reports from the Office of the Public Defender of Rights, and studies. The European Court of Human Rights ruled against the Czech Republic in 2007 for discriminating against Romani schoolchildren by diverting them from mainstream schools into what were then being called the “special schools”.

International institutions have long criticized the Czech Republic for segregating Romani boys and girls from their non-Romani peers in the schools. “If we separate the education of Romani and other children who are excluded from the education of everybody else, we create the conditions for enormous social and societal losses at both national and local level,” finds Desegregace.cz .

Experts point out that in segregated schools, children’s contact with other peers is restricted and their opportunities for education are also different. According to the Czech Government’s Annual Report on the State of the Romani Minority, the quality of education in segregated classes and schools is lower than in mainstream classes and schools.

This difference impacts crime, the development of regions, future state expenditures, health outcomes, indebtedness, and how youth apply themselves. Of the 950,000 boys and girls attending school in 2020/2021, about 35,000 were Romani.

According to data from the Public Defender of Rights, roughly 12 % of Romani boys and girls were instructed in so-called “special” classes or schools, i.e., facilities intended for children with mild mental disability. Just 1.3 % of non-Romani boys and girls attended such facilities.

There are more than 4,200 primary schools (up to ninth grade) in the Czech Republic. Of those, 136 had more than 34 % pupils of Romani origin in the 2021/2022 school year.

In a total of 77 schools, Romani schoolchildren comprised more than half of the student body, while in 32 schools they comprised more than 75 % of the student body and in 17 schools, more than 90 %. Since the 2018/2019 school year, there are now four more primary schools in the country attended almost entirely by Romani children.

According to recommendations, the proportion of Romani children in a school should never exceed 10-15 % and there should never be more than four Romani pupils in a class, otherwise non-Romani parents start re-enrolling their children into different schools (“white flight”), Desegregace.cz reports, referencing an analysis by the Agency for Social Inclusion. According to PAQ Research, segregation restricts the amount of educational success.

A high school graduate, however, will contribute CZK 2.8 million [EUR 120,000 ] more through contributions to health and social security and income taxes than a person with just a ninth-grade education. Improving the educational attainment of the weakest pupils could contribute CZK 18 billion [EUR 765 million] annually to future budgets, according to PAQ Research; Desegregace.cz lists 45 measures to eliminate segregation and improve this situation, including adjusting school catchment areas, advisory services for guardians/parents, assistant educators, the more equal distribution of schoolchildren, preschool education, and tutoring.

In 2007, the European Court for Human Rights found the Czech Republic guilty of reassigning 18 Romani children into “special schools”, thereby discriminating against them and violating their right to education. Inclusion, i.e., bringing children with special needs into mainstream classrooms, began in the Czech Republic in September 2016.