PRESOV, September 21, (WEBNOVINY) — Authorities in Great Britain have taken into social care or given for adoption approximately 68 Roma children from fifteen families who come from Slovakia and the Czech Republic. This problem mostly concerns the Roma from eastern Slovakia. Miroslav Lacko, director of the Slovak national coordination center of the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) said this to SITA news agency after he recently returned from Great Britain. Together with representatives of this organization from other European countries, they were monitoring the number of Roma families whom authorities in Britain have taken away their children because of insufficient care. They visited London, Lancaster, Manchester and other cities.
Lacko found there were various reasons the authorities stated for their decisions. He claimed these were not sexually abused or mistreated children. Some parents only learned of the reasons why their children were taken away from them only after the process of their adoption by British parents began. Lacko said that Roma parents he spoke with, according to British authorities, harmed security of their child by letting them play alone in the yard without adult supervision. A frequent cause was allegedly that little children were left under supervision of older siblings, aged 15 to 17. In one case, an eight-year-old child was taken away from his family after it was found with a cigarette in his mouth. Some families whose child was taken away by British social services are refusing to talk with ENAR representatives for fear that when they start speaking publicly about their case it could aggravate their situation to the extent that they would not be allowed to see their children any see more.
Lacko said that in this situation most Roma parents did not even try to turn to the Slovak authorities and were also inactive toward authorities in the UK. Unlike the highly publicized case of Ivana Boorova, whose two sons Martin and Samko were taken away from her by the British authorities, these people do not know how to defend themselves. According Lacko, the reason is the language barrier and lack of legal awareness. Among the Roma from Slovakia are also individuals who cannot even speak Slovak properly and Britain does not have enough interpreters who can speak Romani. Therefore, many Roma families from Slovakia did not act at all, or acted too late. They are without money, they do not know whom to ask for help, they fear the courts whose status is high in the UK, and gradually resign to their fate. They want to return home to Slovakia, although nothing is waiting for them here. When they left for the UK, often they sold all they had in Slovakia. Now they can only rely on help from relatives. But they never reconciled with the fact that their children were taken away from them, said Lacko.
SITA