Livia Jaroka, a Hungarian MEP of Roma origin, defended the Italian government’s decision to fingerprint the Roma residing in illegal camps in Italy.
The Berlusconi government’s measure reflects “good intentions”, she said in an interview published on the European Union’s Euractive.com portal.
In her view, the fingerprinting will enable Italian authorities to provide immigrants, including children, with personal identification documents.
Jaroka called the European Parliament’s demand to halt the fingerprinting untimely, as a decision was taken to fingerprint all residents of Italy, and thus the measure cannot be considered discriminatory.
EU lawmakers recently branded Italy’s fingerprinting a form of racist and ethnic discrimination. The Council of Europe went even farther, describing it as fascistic. As a consequence, the Italian government modified its plan, declaring that as of 2010 the identity cards of all Italian residents will contain fingerprints.
In the same interview, Jaroka criticised certain Hungarian local governments, for trying to link welfare benefits to performing community services. She also charged the European Commission with failing to adequately promote Roma integration.
I find Lívia Járóka’s comments interesting.
She’s a smart woman so I don’t know why she is letting Silvio Berlusconi off the hook so easily. Berlusconi’s government introduced fingerprinting for all Italians after the European Parliament said the practise of fingerprinting Roma was discriminatory.
I also don’t understand how Járóka, on the one hand can say that the “Berlusconi government’s measure reflects “good intentions” while charging the “European Commission with failing to adequately promote Roma integration.”
Berlusconi is not the only political leader in Europe who is totally uninterested in integrating the Roma. There are many with similar views, even in Hungary.
Joe,
How do you manage never to make any sense?
Why don’t you tell us what would you do for roma integration? Fingerprint legal citizens in their own country? Is this it?
Ooops. The above comment is from me, Stan not Joe.
If one read the original in English instead the interview get a bit different, like:
“She considers that calls by the European Parliament to stop fingerprinting Roma in Italy have lost relevance since the measure has now been extended to every person living in the country”
A bit different from “untimely”. It seems that the MTI-fuckers translated into English an Hungarian summary on the original English article. The source shows what she actually approved for publishing.
So she is not that critical and she is correct also, IMHO. It is a decision that belongs to the NationalState to decide which info the National IDs should contain.
Bela and Stan needs as usual to attend a lesson on racism, before they can understand that, but they are slow learners.
Lívia Járóka is Director of a working group on Roma at the centre-right EPP-ED group in the European Parliament and is vice-president of the Anti-Racism and Diversity Parliamentary Intergroup. IMHO she is preparing to meet similar demands on fingerprinting here in Hungary and defuse them before. By doing that she wants to concentrate the efforts on stopping the proposals that Local Gov’t should link “social benefits delivered to the Roma population to their participation to public works.”
The fingerprinting is now just a lot of hot-air and will not happen anywhere else. The possible tactic from the Italian Gov’t can be to later cancel the new law that applies to all citizens, but it will make other problems.
Yes, translation could be the problem. I only read the version on Politics.Hu