La Barbuta: the municipality of Rome starts to follow judge’s orders
It has been published on the “Corriere della Sera” the order given from the Civil Court in Rome, which on the 30th May 2015 recognized that the “equipped village “ La Barbuta in Rome is discriminatory, accepting in this way the appeal presented by the Associazione 21 luglio e ASGI, with the support of the Open Society Foundations, Amnesty International Italia and the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC). The publication on the national newspaper has been ordered from the same judgmental order. By accepting the thesis of the two organizations, which brought up the nature discriminatory of the “equipped village “ being it a living solution of big dimension addressed to a specific ethnic group, the second section of the Civil Court in Rome ordered to the municipality “the suspension of the conduct and the removal of it as a whole”.
During a press conference at the Senate organized few days after the Court’s order, Associazione 21 luglio and ASGI talked about an historical result, as for the first time in Europe a Court confirmed the nature discriminatory of a “nomad camp”, which is a place internationally recognized as a space of segregation and discrimination on ethnic’s origins.
The “equipped village “ La Barbuta, inaugurated on 2012 under the mayor Alemanno, is one of the seven villages in the Capital, where at the moment are living approximately 600 people in precarious sanitary conditions, whose human rights result constantly violated, how results from the report “Terminal Barbuta” published by the Associazione 21 luglio in 2014. After visiting the “camp”, also the Commissioner for Human Rights of the European Council Nils Muižnieks defined it “a village segregated on ethnic base”.
By publishing the order on the Corriere della Sera, declared the Associazione 21 luglio, the Municipality of Rome started to realize what had been ordered by the judges, a fact that the Association regard as positive.
The Association will keep monitoring the situation carefully and underline with the authorities the necessity to close finally the wide camp created, a shame for Rome, and to identify new and virtuous paths that will conduct these families to a real inclusion, both in residential terms and socially.
Traduzione di Antonella Vinciguerra