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Billionaire philanthropist and financier George Soros has said at a top-level EU conference on the problems facing Roma people in Europe that he supports legal action against Italy over recent anti-Gypsy measures, particularly the fingerprinting of adults and children.
“Certainly, fingerprinting, racial profiling and so on is unacceptable and, I believe, illegal, and I hope that the European Court of Justice will take up the case and declare it illegal,” the Hungarian-born founder of the Open Society Institute said on Tuesday (16 September) in a press conference at the first “European http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4938 Summit” in Brussels, an event jointly organised by the European Commission and the Soros foundation.
“I am worried that this could become a de facto European standard,” Mr Soros added.
Earlier this year, Mr Berlusconi’s government declared a national state of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4614 in response to a rise in crime blamed mainly on Romanian immigrants and announced that authorities would begin fingerprinting the Roma population.The move was widely denounced by human rights organisations, with critics comparing the move to the policies of Benito Mussolini, the country’s fascist leader in the first part of the 20th Century.
The scheme was given a green light by the European Commission in early September.
During his opening address at the summit, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso was interrupted by protesters wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Stop Ethnic Profiling.”
“What you have written on your t-shirts – we agree with that,” Barroso said to applause from summit participants, although he refrained from commenting directly on the Italian case.
Social affairs commissioner Vladimir Spidla told a press conference that “ethnic profiling is unacceptable.”
“The commission must use all the measures necessary to protect personal information,” Mr Spidla said, adding that the commission would remain vigilant.