All events · The War's Long Shadow

Roma Persecution, Coerced Assimilation and Expulsion in Postwar Europe

c. 1945–2012 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement Territory Seized

What happened

Roma across postwar Europe were subject to a sequence of coercive measures that the atlas's Porajmos entry, ending in 1945, does not reach. Communist states banned nomadism and dispersed Romani settlements — Czechoslovakia's law of 1958 and dispersal programme of 1965 are the best documented — and pursued assimilation through segregated schooling and, in Czechoslovakia and its successor states, the sterilisation of Romani women without valid consent, first exposed by Charter 77 in 1978, found unlawful by the Czech public defender of rights in 2005 and compensated by Czech legislation in 2021. After 1989, Roma were displaced by pogrom-style attacks in several countries, and some 80,000-100,000 Roma and Ashkali fled Kosovo in and after 1999. In western Europe, Italy's 2008 'nomad emergency' decrees, later annulled by the Italian courts, and France's 2010 clearance of Roma camps and organised returns to Romania and Bulgaria drew censure from the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner and the European Commission. The measures are unified less by a single perpetrator than by a continent-wide pattern documented by the Council of Europe and the European Roma Rights Centre.

Parties

Communist and later democratic European states banned nomadism, dispersed and sterilised Roma, evicted them from settlements and expelled Roma migrants across EU borders

Disputed

Whether the western European camp clearances and returns of 2008-2012 amounted to collective expulsion on ethnic grounds, as the European Roma Rights Centre and the Council of Europe's commissioner argued, or to lawful enforcement of residence rules, as the French and Italian governments maintained.

The denominator

The Council of Europe's average estimate is roughly 10-12 million Roma in Europe, about 6 million of them in European Union states; national censuses record far fewer because many Roma do not declare their ethnicity, so official counts are typically a third to a half of the estimate. There is no reliable pan-European Roma population figure for 1945.

The baseline is a present-day estimate while the events span 1945 to 2012, a period in which the Roma population of Europe roughly doubled, so any ratio against it understates the share of the community affected in the earlier decades.

Where the baseline comes from

Romani people — Wikipediaopen-edited
Antiziganism — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

There was no mass killing in this period. Deaths arose from individual racist attacks and from pogrom-style incidents in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech lands in the 1990s and 2000s, numbering in the dozens; these are documented case by case by the European Roma Rights Centre rather than aggregated.

Documented forms of violence

Destruction of PropertyDenationalizationCultural Destruction

The European Roma Rights Centre and the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights documented the camp clearances, forced evictions and statelessness affecting Roma in France, Italy and the former Yugoslavia.

Formal findings

Public Defender of Rights (Ombudsman), Czech Republic (2005) — 2005 final statement concluding that Romani women had been sterilised without informed consent in breach of the law, prompting a government expression of regret in 2009 and a compensation act in 2021 — source

Movements mapped

Roma and Ashkali displaced from Kosovo after 199990,000
Roma returned from France to Romania and Bulgaria, 2010

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Czechia, Kosovo, Romania, France

Sources

Romani people in Czechoslovakia — Wikipediaopen-edited
Parallel Report by the European Roma Rights Centre concerning France — OHCHR Universal Periodic Reviewofficial
2010 French Roma repatriation — Wikipediaopen-edited
Antiziganism — Wikipediaopen-edited
Romani people in France — Wikipediaopen-edited