August 2007
Visitors of the Sziget Festival 2007, Budapest were offered to attend a three-day program series on different kinds of interesting forums, related to Roma and the education of Roma. The main topics were school segregation, the system of minority self-governments and equal opportunities. The overall aim of the series was to strengthen and popularize tolerance.
August 2007
Visitors of the Sziget Festival 2007, Budapest were offered to attend a three-day program series on different kinds of interesting forums, related to Roma and the education of Roma. The main topics were school segregation, the system of minority self-governments and equal opportunities. The overall aim of the series was to strengthen and popularize tolerance.
Amaro Drom, the monthly Roma journal prepared two roundtables for the “islanders”, while there was a 90 minutes public conversation on segregation test cases on the Civil Stage as well.
As it has previously been reported in the Hungarian press, the Chance For Children Foundation with the support of Ms. Viktoria Mohacsi MEP, have had issued about a dozen test cases on school segregation of Roma children in several settlements of Hungary.
Reporting on these cases, a film was aired on those Roma children, who had been declared mentally disadvantaged unfairly. The theme served as the core of the following public conversation with invited guest experts and lecturers such as Judit Szira Roma Education Fund Senior Advisor, Gábor Sárközi expert of the Ministry of Education in Hungary and Viktoria Mohacsi MEP, who were deeply analyzing the evolved situation in an extremely vivid and lively session.
Dr Ernõ Kallai, Minority Ombudsman, Balázs Majtényi templar, Judit Tóth templar and Maria Baranyi expert drew the attention of the audience on the problematic points of the system of the Hungarian Minority Self-Governments through a roundtable conversation, pointing out on their financial and information defenselessness.
Monitoring report of the Council of Europe dealing with the problems of the Hungarian minority self-government system firstly mentions that representatives of the local minority self-governments are uninformed and unaware, having insufficient information on different offers and possibilities. Further more, the National Gypsy Self-Government would not supply them with sufficient information either.
Interested visitors of the Sziget Festival had three days in the camp of the Wesley University that aids disadvantaged youngsters, to get an idea about problems of being discrimminated on the basis of race or gender or even poverty or handicap.
