The ECHR had been seized by a young Roma from Hungary who believes he has been deprived of a good quality education because of his origins.
A victory after a long legal battle. It was first of all the mother of Imre Szolcsan, a young Roma boy, who lodged a complaint in 2013 before the Hungarian courts when he was 8 years old. At that time, Imre was going to public school in his village, on the outskirts of Budapest. In Hungary, the Roma have been settled for centuries, speak Hungarian, and therefore go to school like all other children.
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The problem with the school in Imre is that, apart from the fact that there were practically only young Roma, the level was very low. The teachers had no time for Imre, who is hard of hearing. His mother therefore wanted to enroll him in a better school, where Imre could have followed an education adapted to his handicap. We refused to enroll his son.
To justify this refusal, the management indicated that the school was too far from Imre’s home. A fallacious pretext, because Imre would have taken only five minutes by bus to get there. Moreover, in Hungary, the law allows parents to choose the place of schooling of their child. For Imre’s mother, it was clear that the school was rejecting her son because he is Roma. She filed a complaint in the Hungarian courts. In vain. So with the help of an NGO based in Brussels, which defends the rights of Roma, Imre went to European justice.
Deep-rooted school segregation
This case is exceptional, but unfortunately, in Hungary, very often, Roma children are very often in different schools or in separate classes. According to a study by the European Commission, in 2016 almost half of young Roma schoolchildren were separated from others, despite Hungarian law prohibiting school discrimination and segregation. Over the past ten years, there have been dozens of complaints from Roma families against the state.
It is difficult to say whether the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights based in Strasbourg can change anything. The Court of Strasbourg does not limit itself to sanctioning Hungary, which will have to pay 7,000 euros to the plaintiff. She also says, and this is a precedent, that Hungary must end school segregation throughout the country. However, this will be difficult to implement.
Because the nationalist government of Viktor Orban denies any discrimination. And then there is an insidious segregation. The government gives a lot of support to religious schools, it gives them three times more money per pupil than it gives to public schools. In ten years, the number of religious schools has doubled. When a religious school opens in a village, non-Roma parents tend to withdraw their children from public school and enroll them there. As a result, there are only Roma left in the village public school.