DO ROMANI LIVES MATTER?
Police officers are pinning a bare-chested man to the ground. One officer exerts pressure on the man’s legs, while another places his knee upon the man’s neck. A third officer attempts to handcuff him. Undeterred by the man’s cries of agony, the first officer keeps his knee on the man’s neck, grinding his face into the pavement. After five minutes, the man falls silent. The officer removes his knee but places his hands on the man’s torso. He now appears unconscious.
This is the final frame of a video filmed by a witness on their mobile.1 It made the death of Stanislav Tomáš in Teplice, Czech Republic, into worldwide news. Shortly after, Tomáš was taken to an ambulance where he was pronounced dead.
The video was recorded on 19 June 2021. Just six days before, Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, was sentenced to 22 years and six months in a US prison. As news of Tomáš’s death spread across the world, the similarities with the Floyd case were obvious: in both cases, a man had died after a police officer knelt on his neck.
Chauvin’s conviction had followed the enormous and ongoing Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which could yet fundamentally change the brutal way US law enforcement has policed black Americans over decades. But Tomáš was killed in the Czech Republic – and he was Romani. While the Floyd comparison prompted widespread international coverage, his story was soon forgotten.
However Tomáš’s death raises a long-neglected question: in the eyes of governments, law enforcement bodies and society at large, do Romani lives matter?
Shocking incidents of police brutality against Roma span from Sweden and Finland to Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Greece. It’s a shameful reminder of the entrenched institutional prejudice faced by Europe’s largest ethnic minority, who top the charts of social disadvantage across the continent. Despite growing swathes of the media, civil society, government – and even large corporations – falling over each other to claim that they champion diversity, there is a profound and enduring reluctance to embrace the cause of the Roma. To
