Session 5: Minorities, Rights and Inclusion
5th Global Conference
Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria
Free to Move but Nowhere to Go: The Renovation of Freedom of Movement as a Human Right for the Roma
Alessandra Beasley Von Burg
Wake Forest University, USA
This paper proposes a renovation of European Union citizenship as a more inclusive model that equates the Roma and other marginalized or non-citizens with EU citizens, based on what they already do and are associated with: freedom of movement.
I address the differences between freedom of movement as EU right and the concept of being free to move and freedom as human rights. Both freedom of movement as a EU right and freedom as a human right address the problem of the Roma population in the EU because this renovation of EU citizenship as more inclusive reconnects the basic human rights and the specific EU right to a population that already lives as travelers in nomadic, semi-permanent ways. This renovation returns to the historic roots of their plight and forced marginalization not to stereotype or isolate them further, but to renew their freedom to be and do what they want and to move, live, work and travel as members of the EU community.
The renovation of EU citizenship as more inclusive captures the goals of the EU and all their initiatives (like the Decade of Roma inclusion) to connect them with what the Roma already practice, so that a new mode of citizenship based on common practices and similar habits emerges. Following Giambattista Vico’s theory of ingenium, this new vision of citizenship does not erase differences, rather citizens are connected to others based on what they have in common as human rights and the innovative rights of a transnational body like the EU, so that freedom of movement is not just a right for some, but an accepted practice in a transforming world that reflects about the reasons why some have been moving for centuries and the lessons we can learn from the Roma as adaptable, creative citizens beyond nations.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Immigrant Voting Rights within the European Union and the Southern African Development Community: Can the EU Model be Applied in the Developmental and Post-Colonial Context of SADC?
Thembinkosi Wilson Maseko
University of South Africa, South Africa
Voting during regular elections remains one of the most critical ways in which individuals influence governmental decision-making. While the right to vote is widely recognized as a fundamental human right, this right has always been and continues to be marked by the selective disenfranchisement of certain classes of people, including resident non-citizens. The continued disenfranchisement of non-citizen residents is surprising in the era of a large-scale migration, where democracies today host populations of non-citizens that reside within their borders for years, if not decades or lifetimes. These residents pay taxes and share more political interests with their local neighbours than they do with the citizens in their home countries. Section 8B(1) of the Maastricht Treaty (1992) recognises the right of these resident non-citizens to vote as a key element in the political integration of the European Union and an important stepping stone towards an active sense of European citizenship. The contrast with SADC is dramatic. While the political integration of the region is recognised as an essential supplement to economic integration, the question of post national forms of regional citizenship and voting rights do not receive any specific attention in the SADC Treaty. The recent SADC Protocol on the Facilitation of Movement of Persons (2005) yet again ignores this aspect of economic migration. In my paper I compare the status of non-citizen voting rights in the EU and SADC. In the process it seeks to address the following two issues: (i) why SADC (lead in this regard by resistance from South Africa) has been and remains reluctant to embrace non-citizenship voting rights despite the outbreak of xenophobic violence during May 2008 that left more than 60 people dead; and (ii) the potential and the limits of the European model of non-citizen voting rights as a means of ensuring political integration in the developmental and post-colonial context of SADC.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
How to Empower Gypsies? An Ethnographic Study
Elisabetta Di Giovanni
Palermo University, Italy
The work focuses on the case of the nomad camp of Palermo, in south Italy, where three groups of “gypsies” live since twenty-five years, in condition of ghetto. This nomad camp constitutes a world out of the city, better an encompassed microcosm, with sporadic contact with citizenship or public administration, excepted for voluntaries. This means that there are not interrelations between the camp and the rest of the external space. On the contrary, the three different groups represent for the outside a generic nebulous whole, confined in a green area, surrounded by a high wall. Don’t see them signifies don’t care about them, about their living conditions, about their culture and about their identity. The only interaction between “them” and “us” happens when Romanì exit every morning from the camp and cross the municipal streets: children roam alone, asking for food, some little boy is disguised as a girl in order to provoke more compassion on passing people. Adults, instead, prefer traffic lights for begging charity. And so gypsy children are seen as abandoned, while adults are considered as unemployed who don’t want to search a work, always “producing” children. In the people imagery there is a lot of ethnocentric prejudice, especially in term of exclusivity and stigmatisation: first of all the idea that the occidental space is invaded by this unpleasant microcosm that must stay in its boundaries. Inside this ethnic framework, we hypothesize a social intervention through the empowerment approach (Moreno, 2009) and the “street level bureaucracy” (Lipski, 1980) in order to gain a first form of social security cushion in the long way for social inclusion.
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