Slovak ombudsman says police brutality violated the human rights of a Romani family
The police officers who executed a brutal intervention in 2019 against several members of a Romani family when they raided the municipality of Milhosť in eastern Slovakia violated their fundamental rights. Those are the results of an investigation published by the Slovak Public Defender of Rights (ombudsman) Robert Dobrovodský.
According to the findings of a complaint filed with the ombudsman by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), the behavior of the police was disproportionate and constitutes humiliating treatment, violating the European Convention on Human Rights. The Public Defender of Rights also wrote to the director of the Regional Police Directorate in Košice with the recommendation that the officers be disciplined and trained in human rights restrictions with regard to the use of force.
The Public Defender of Rights also recommended the Slovak Interior Minister introduce the use of body cameras by officers, either across the board or in a broader set of circumstances, in order to follow the course of their on-duty interventions. ERRC president Đorđe Jovanović made the following comment on the findings: “How many more cases of police brutality against Romani people have to happen before Slovakia wakes up? Despite the fact that several similar cases have happened in Slovakia in recent years, the recommendations of the Public Defender of Rights, who has been calling for several years for the creation of a genuinely independent inspectorate of the police and for the use of body cameras during on-duty interventions, remain unheard. A truly independent inspectorate of the police would mean officers’ suspected wrongdoing will not be investigated by other officers. The current state of affairs contravenes all of the above and seems absurd to us.”
The incident in Milhosť transpired on the evening of 23 July 2019. Two young Romani men aged 17 and 18 were arrested by the police in a local pub and subsequently beaten, both on the spot and later at the police station.
Police then entered the home of one of the arrestees and physically assaulted his mother and her aunt, beating them in the front garden and in the yard in front of several witnesses. One of the youths has described how police “Put us in the car and started to beat us.”
After arriving at the police station, the physical attacks continued. “We stood there for three hours, I was lying on the ground because I couldn’t stand up anymore, I’d been sitting in between two of them and they beat me from both sides everywhere,” the assaulted Romani youth said.
One of the officers is said to have spat into the mouth of one of the youths. They were released the following day.
After the youths were arrested and taken to the station, several officers returned to Milhost’ and arrested three women related to them. During that intervention, they dragged one of the women by her hair out in front of the house, during which she suffered from fractured fingers.
Officers also put a pistol to another woman’s head. At the station, the women say they were locked in a room with cleaning supplies and in a toilet.
The women were released in the early morning hours of the next day. The ERRC is currently providing legal representation to the two Romani teenagers in a proceeding before the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic as well as to the two Romani women who were also subjected to the police brutality in a proceeding before the European Court of Human Rights.
