Taken from BETA

State secretary to the Ministry of Justice, Gordana Stamenic, stated today that total of 20,679 Roma have been subsequently registered in birth registries since 2009 and the plan is to register all people currently identified as legally invisible by 2015. She pointed to the journalists in Belgrade that she had no precise data on the number of unregistered Roma but that there is an impression that their number is getting smaller as there are increasingly fewer requests for subsequent birth registration.

At the presentation of the results achieved in the project on solving the problems of undocumented Roma, she pointed out that the Law on Registry Books from 2009 did not contribute much and in 2012 it was necessary to pass the Law on Amendments to the Law on Non-Contentious Procedure.

“The Law on Registry Books has recognized the children without parental care and need of registration in birth registries after the prescribed period. However, there were cases when persons could not prove the precise date of birth and needed to go through a non-contentious procedure”, Stamenic said.

According to her, the request for registration in birth registry books may be also submitted by a social welfare centre, besides by persons who want to exercise that right, being thereby exempted from all court and administrative fees.

Stamenic stressed that the Agreement of Understanding signed in April 2012 by the Ministry of Justice, Ombudsperson and UNHCR, had particularly contributed to solving of the Roma problem.

Based on that Agreement, as it was said, a lot of trainings were organized for judges, employees in social welfare centres and registrars, as well as visits to Roma settlements. Head of the UNHCR Representative Office in Serbia Eduardo Arboleda stressed that Serbia is the first country in the Western Balkan which has signed such agreement and which actively works on the solution of the problem of “legally invisible”.

“There is still much to be done, as all children have the right be registered in birth registry book at birth, while those without permanent residence registered can be registered at the address of social welfare centre, in order to provide conditions for obtaining ID cards”, Arboleda said.

The Deputy Ombudsperson Robert Sepi expressed satisfaction at the results of the partnership with Ministry of Justice and UNHCR and assessed that the problem of Roma registration was being solved at good pace.

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