The EU Fundamental Rights Agency presented today its report titled "The situation of Roma in 11 EU Member States: Survey results at a glance" in the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee of the European Parliament. MEP Lívia Járóka, Rapporteur of the EU strategy on Roma inclusion welcomed that the survey also included six enlargement countries and expressed her hope that the upcoming, all-European research would cover the whole range of socio-economic indicators.
The survey – that has been conducted by the consortium of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and the European Commission – measured the situation of Roma people in 11 EU Member States, in the post-Yugoslavian area and inMoldova. The research encompassed the four priority areas of education, employment, housing and health, and was based on the processing of app. 85,000 questionnaires. The findings of the study clearly show that the indicators of Roma communities are much worse than those of the majority society and they have a significant lag not only compared to the national or regional average, but also compared to their non-Roma neighbours in their close proximity.
In her speech MEP Lívia Járóka, the European Parliament's Rapporteur of the EU strategy on Roma inclusion welcomed that the Western Balkans and Moldova had been involved in the research and expressed her hope that after the completion of the pilot period, the FRA would conduct an extensive research covering all Member States. She reminded that the European Parliament's report and the non-paper of the Hungarian Presidency have called for a comprehensive "crisis map" which would measure the most disadvantaged micro-regions – where marginalized communities concentrate – by their fundamental socio-economic attributes. Járóka recommended including more of these indicators in the next surveys, such as the accessibility of workplaces, the distance of city centres, the quality of public services, environmental conditions, or transport infrastructure.