PRESS RELEASE
UN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS: SECOND ORAL STATEMENT BY THE TRANSNATIONAL RADICAL PARTY. A STRONG EFFORT TO CREATE GYPSY SCHOOLS IS NEEDED BY THE UN AND THE MEMBER STATES. IN KOLIN (CZECH REPUBLIC) THE FIRST ONE. A SPECIFIC ITEM ON GYPSIES SHOULD BE IN THE AGENDA OF 2001 WORLD CONFERENCE ON RACISM
Geneva, March 31th 1999
The Transnational Radical Party has delivered its second Oral Statement in the UN Commission on Human Rights, currently sitting in Geneva.
Paolo Pietrosanti - delivering the Statement also on behalf of the International Romani Union, the only gypsy organization with a NGO Status in the UN system - has expressed his gratitude to those Ministers who in their speeches here have at least reminded the existence of a nation of around ten million members in Europe (Minister Geremek of Poland and the Finnish one Aalonen spoke about it).
Racism belongs to the inner soul of the humanity, and it cannot be eradicated - said Pietrosanti;Gypsies should be rather helped to strenghten their leading group, and the example of the Gypsy school in Kolin (Czech Republic) is of extreme importance.
It shouldn't be fergotten - Pietrosanti added - that " a number of daughters and sons of the diplomats who are sitting here go to foreign schools in any country where their parents' job brings them. And the Gypsy is always abroad."
"The Gypsy Nation is very far from being estinguished: it is one of those Nations that have been and are able to resist, even having suffered a genocide, and suffering a continue discrimination. It has to be helped, but not because of charity. All the countries have the interest to support the only people that is a Nation, and does not want to be a state: a treasure for the entire human community: the Nation of globalization cuts through the traditional identity of a state as the union between a nation and a territory. The Gypsy specificity is a treasure for the entire Mankind; it is for the sake of everybody that it is urgent for Gypsies to create new institutional forms, adequate to the nowadays world: even using examples like the one of the Knights of Malta."
The Statement has also asked for the inclusion in the World Conference on Racism of a specific Item on Roma, and to charge the Special Rapporteur to draft a specific Report on Gypsies.