On this year’s International Roma Day, celebrated all over the world on 8 April, the Roma in Serbia continue to be one of the most marginalised and discriminated social groups. Low educational level, unemployment, inadequate living conditions, difficult financial situation, hindered access to personal documents, health care and social welfare remain to be the challenges often faced by the Roma in Serbia. 

Despite some progress achieved over the past several years in the field of exercising and protecting certain rights, Roma continue to face obstacles that hinder or completely prevent their access to certain rights on a daily basis. Thus, there are still children who cannot be registered at birth due to inadequate regulations and who therefore remain excluded from the system of health care and social welfare in the most vulnerable period of their lives. The situation of Roma children is particularly worrying because they are at a much higher risk of early dropout and/or becoming victims of child, early and forced marriages. Social exclusion, discrimination, segregation, intolerance and prejudice are negative phenomena that are too often associated with the Roma community.

A society in which one of the largest national minorities lives in the situation that is by far worse than the situation of the majority population can in no case be considered successful. Therefore, Praxis urges all institutions to pay more attention to the numerous problems faced by Roma, and to invest more efforts to change inadequate regulations and eradicate poor practices and discrimination because otherwise the situation of Roma cannot be improved.