Platform for the right to adequate housing was presented today at the meeting held on the occasion of the eviction of informal Roma settlement in Block 72 in Novi Beograd. More than sixty civil society organizations (CSOs), eight networks, CSOs coalitions, and the National Council of the Roma National Minority have supported the Platform.

The Platform is an informal grouping of NGOs working at the domestic and international level on issues of human rights, anti-discrimination, anti-racism and Roma rights. The need to create this platform came from a worrying increase of forced evictions over the past three years – 15 forced evictions, which affected over 1,500 Roma, have been identified.

This document gathers the organizations which express concern over the increased number of forced evictions conducted contrary to ratified international standards binding on the Republic of Serbia, and it primarily presents the attitudes related to the forced eviction of the informal Roma settlement in Block 72. In addition, the Platform provides recommendations for all forthcoming evictions.

Platform for the right to adequate housing represents a contribution of CSOs to the elaboration of regulations or other documents, which will regulate the evictions of informal settlements in compliance with international human rights standards.

The Platform has been presented to the Ministry of Environment, Mining and Spatial Planning, Ministry of Human and Minority Rights, Public Administration and Local Self-Governance – Directorate for Human and Minority Rights, Republic Housing Agency, Commissariat for Refugees of the Republic of Serbia and representatives of the City of Belgrade. 

Download: Platform for the Right to Adequate Housing

Despite the severest commendation of the announced eviction and undertaking of all available legal activities, and the international action of solidarity with Mevljuda Kurtesi and her family, she and her six minor children were forcibly evicted from the flat in 4 Ljeska Street in Banovo Brdo in Belgrade on 25 October 2011. This is another in the series of illegal forced evictions in the territory of the City of Belgrade, which turned Mevljuda and her children, internally displaced persons from Kosovo, into homeless people and deprived them of the possibility to have a decent life. The eviction was followed by racial comments of the neighbours, which culminated with unabashed joy when Mevljuda was evicted in the street.

To remind, Belgrade Land Development Public Agency, which previously gave Mevljuda the flat for use and now requires the eviction, did not offer the alternative accommodation or the explanation for the eviction. The Municipality of Cukarica rejected written requirements from several non-governmental organizations to suspend the eviction since it was contrary to international standards to which our country committed itself by ratifying the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which refer to the eviction process and provision of an alternative accommodation.

Since we refuse to be accomplices in this inhuman and illegal eviction of Mevljuda and her children, we decided to support by our presence her decision to remain in the apartment she lives in. On that occasion, two activists of the Regional Centre for Minorities, who did not want to move from the entrance to Mevljuda’s apartment, were taken to police station Cukarica where they were interrogated in the presence of the legal representative from YUCOM. Criminal charges were pressed against them for the criminal act of “justice disturbance” based on the Article 336 b of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Serbia. We consider this as a pressure made on human rights defenders, with an intention to intimidate and give up from the consistent and unreserved struggle for full respect of human rights.

We demand that the competent city institutions immediately provide an adequate alternative accommodation for Mevljuda, who is temporarily accommodated in the cardboard barrack at her mother’s in the informal Roma settlement Belvil. At the same time, we point to the state institutions, which want to criminalize solidarity and distract us from such commitment, that we will continue uncompromisingly  defend human rights and stand by those whose rights are violated, who are poor and deprived.


Women in Black
Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights – YUCOM
Youth Initiative for Human Rights – YIHR
Praxis
Minority Rights Centre
Regional Centre for Minorities

The Coalition for Access to Justice was established on 23 December 2011. The Coalition members are the following organisations: Centre for Advanced Legal Studies, Civil Rights Defenders, CHRIS - Network of the Committees for Human Rights in Serbia, Humanitarian Law Centre, Youth Initiative for Human Rights, Independent Journalists' Association of Serbia, Sandzak Committee for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms and Praxis. The Coalition members have associated with the aim to jointly respond to the restrictions on the achieved level of human rights and freedoms regarding the exercise of the rights to access to justice, which ensued as the consequence of the adoption of the new Law on Civil Procedure, as well as the Criminal Procedure Code and the Criminal Code.

In the upcoming period, the Coalition activities will be focused on advocating for the amendments to the aforementioned laws and the adoption of the Law on Free Legal Aid that will fully respect the citizens' interests regarding their freedom to choose and receive high-quality legal aid.   

Today we are marking the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, the most important international act aimed at preventing statelessness.

It is estimated that worldwide there are about 12 million stateless persons – those who are not considered to be nationals by any state under the operation of its law and who are denied access to all other rights on a daily basis as a consequence of being deprived of citizenship.

Statelessness may be the result of the conflicts of laws, discriminatory regulations depriving the marginalised communities of the possibility to acquire citizenship, succession of states after which a number of citizens do not succeed in acquiring citizenship of the newly established states, administrative practices related to the acquisition, recovery and loss of citizenship, as well as other numerous reasons.

In a world divided into states and citizens, those who fail to fit in that division are subject to various forms of exclusion. As a result, people without any citizenship have always encountered expulsions and restrictions on their fundamental human rights and freedoms. The Convention, whose fifty years of existence is celebrated today, resulted from the efforts of the international community to provide protection to those who cannot get protection from any state and to prevent the emergence of more people that no country would consider to be their nationals. Half a century later, the lives of stateless persons still attract the attention of the international community; there are newly emerging obstacles to the realisation of the right to citizenship and new causes of statelessness, but also the expectations that a solution will be finally found for those that cannot call any country their own.

Marking the anniversary of the Convention is an opportunity to once again point to the difficulties of those who face a risk of statelessness in Serbia and the necessity of solving their problems that have been neglected for too long.

There are those among them who have not been registered in birth registry books and for that reason remained without citizenship. Some of them were registered in the citizenship registry books that were destroyed, while others were left without citizenship upon the dissolution of the former state or acquired citizenship of one of the former republics in which they do not live.

You can read more about the obstacles to exercise the right to citizenship in the Republic of Serbia, the groups whose right to citizenship continues to be violated and the recommendations for overcoming the identified problems in the Praxis’ report entitled "Persons at Risk of Statelessness in Serbia."

Download the report: Persons at Risk of Statelessness in Serbia   

The non-governmental organisation Praxis welcomes the fact that the Bill Amending the Law on Non-contentious Procedure has been recently sent to the parliamentary procedure. The adoption of this law will be a step forward towards resolving the problems of legally invisible persons - those who have not been registered into birth registry books and who are prevented from exercising their basic human rights granted by the Constitution and legislation of the Republic of Serbia.

Let us be reminded that after many years of continuous efforts invested by Praxis, the Center for Advanced Legal Studies and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, into resolving the problem of legally invisible persons in a systemic way, Praxis and the Center for Advanced Legal Studies, in cooperation with the Protector of Citizens, drafted a proposal of the Law Amending the Law on Non-contentious Procedure, which was adopted by the government last week. This law has ended up in the parliamentary procedure after numerous appeals of the civil sector, recommendations of international organisations, UN treaty bodies and the European Union, which persistently pointed to the necessity of solving the problems of legally invisible persons.

It has been estimated that around 6,500 of legally invisible persons, mostly Roma, live in Serbia and that due to administrative barriers, multi-generational social exclusion and poverty, war events and the absence of legal provisions that would recognise them as citizens of Serbia, they have not been able to exercise any of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and ratified international instruments in the field of human rights.

The non-governmental organisation Praxis expects that the MPs of the National Assembly will recognise the seriousness of the problems faced by legally invisible persons and that the current composition of the National Assembly will adopt the Bill Amending the Law on Non-contentious Procedure, which will allow these persons to enjoy equal rights like all other citizens of Serbia.

The Coalition against Discrimination strongly condemns the yesterday's racially motivated attack on A.O., a third grade student of the Secondary School of Commerce, which occurred in Belgrade. The attack on this young man was accompanied by racist insults and curses, which in addition to serious bodily harm, violated the dignity of this young man. A quick response of the police that have already arrested the perpetrators deserves praise and raises hope that the police will respond promptly and efficiently also in other similar cases with less media coverage.

In the past year, the Coalition against Discrimination recorded several cases of racially motivated attacks on Roma men and women and their homes, and other racist incidents to which the state authorities failed to respond in a proper manner. The investigation often ended with an indictment against unknown persons, and the motive of hatred towards the members of a minority group was not considered to be an aggravating circumstance. We emphasise that the Law on the Prohibition of Discrimination stipulates that the punishable offences in which hatred or hostility towards a person because of his/her personal characteristic is a predominant or exclusive motive qualify as severe discrimination.

Moreover, the unambiguously racist attacks are often characterised as peer violence, hooligan incidents, usual quarrels among the neighbours, and so on. Even the Roma National Council, a body that should unreservedly represent the interests of its ethnic community, refrained to call the yesterday's event by its right name, opting for the neutral term "vandalism". By avoiding naming these attacks by their right name, we avoid facing with the essence of the problem. Therefore, we once again emphasise the importance of codifying hate crimes and introducing adequate legal penalties for the offences perpetrated out of hatred towards a minority group.
At the same time, the members of minority communities often, understandably, distrust the state and its institutions, and the hate crimes that go unpunished do not contribute to building confidence and do not encourage them to report these crimes. Particularly disconcerting is the indifference of society that has normalised racist stereotypes and insults, many of which have found their place in the media, literature, textbooks, and so on. Hence, in addition to the adoption of the laws and their consistent application, it is important to work on changing people's consciousness and achieving the commitment of the entire society that any form of racism will not be tolerated.

The members of the Coalition against Discrimination are: Center for Advanced Legal Studies, Civil Rights Defenders, Labris - Lesbian Human Rights Organisation, Anti-Trafficking Centre, Network of the Committees for Human Rights in Serbia (CHRIS Network), Association of Students with Disabilities, Gayten LGBT, Praxis and Regional Center for Minorities.

The statement is supported by Women in Black.

Download (only in Serbian): Discrimination in Serbia for 2010

The Coalition against Discrimination presented its 2010 Annual Report on Discrimination in Serbia and awarded prizes for combating discrimination in 2010. Sasa Gajin, Coordinator of the Coalition against Discrimination and Ljupka Mihajlovska from the Association of Students with Disabilities spoke about the report.

The Coalition against Discrimination established the annual Award for Combating Discrimination in recognition of individuals, organisations, institutions, companies and the media who have invested the greatest efforts, in the course of one year, to combat discrimination against minority and marginalised groups and contributed to the promotion of equality of all citizens in Serbia. The Coalition against Discrimination decides on the award winners on the basis of the proposals submitted by individuals and organisations by the end of 2010. The members of the Coalition against Discrimination are: Center for Advanced Legal Studies, Civil Rights Defenders, CHRIS – Network of the Committees for Human Rights in Serbia, Gayten LGBT, Labris - Lesbian Human Rights Organisation, Praxis, Regional Center for Minorities, Association of Students with Disabilities.

This year’s winners of the Award for Combating Discrimination for the outstanding contribution to the fight against discrimination in 2010 are:

Public authorities:  Residential Institution for Adults Male pcelice
Civil society organisations: NGO IZ Kruga, Organisation for the Protection of Rights and Support of Women and Children with Disabilities in Serbia
Media: Film Festival Slobodna zona
Business sector: Metro Cash & Carry d.o.o. Belgrade
Public figures: Dragoljub Rasa Todosijevic, artist

Mr. Björn Mossberg, Head of Development and Cooperation Department of the Swedish Embassy in Belgrade, handed the awards to the winners.

The sixth generation of students of the Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade, have successfully completed their practice in Praxis within the Refugee Legal Clinic, initiated by UNHCR.

During practice, the students had the opportunity to visit the Praxis office, to meet with its employees and get acquainted with their work, and to attend the lectures on the right to access documents, property rights in Kosovo, access to rights for refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and protection of victims of sexual and gender-based violence.

In addition to visiting the office, the students joined Praxis mobile teams in their field work, where they were introduced to the life stories and legal problems of the Roma, refugees and IDPs living in collective centres and informal settlements.

At the final seminar held on 15 June 2011, the students shared their impressions gained from the completed practice, emphasising that it helped them a great deal to recognise the widespread prejudice about the target groups for whose rights Praxis advocates. During the final seminar, the students were awarded certificates.

Download: UNHCR Report Observations on the Situation of Asylum Seekers and Beneficiaries of International Protection in Serbia