Italy wants to limit free movement of Roma people
France to host seven-country meeting of immigration ministers.
The Italian government is pushing for permission from its European Union partners to restrict the free movement of Roma people.
Roberto Maroni, Italy’s interior minister, said he wanted restrictions to be discussed at a ministerial meeting being organised by the French government on 6 September.
Human-rights warning
Italy’s announcement follows the launch in France last week of a campaign to demolish Roma camps and repatriate inhabitants to Romania and Bulgaria, prompting human rights groups to warn of a growing climate of intolerance in the EU.
Éric Besson, France’s immigration minister, has issued invitations to six other countries to join France at the 6 September meeting, in what appears to be a continuation of its efforts to shape EU immigration policy through a vanguard.
He has invited the EU’s five most populous member states, Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain, the country that currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers, Belgium, plus Greece, a popular transit country for migrants seeking to enter the EU.
Besson wants to discuss co-operation on immigration policy between the EU and Canada and has invited Jason Kenney, Canada’s immigration minister, to attend.
Mandatory deportation
Maroni is looking to add Roma to the agenda. He told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that Italy should be allowed to proceed with mandatory deportation of Roma who “violate” basic requirements for living in a member state other than their state of nationality. He said that these requirements should include “a minimum level of income, adequate housing and not being a burden on the social welfare system of the country hosting them”. He said that he would push at the meeting on 6 September for Italy to be granted the right to do this.
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The Italian government in 2008 launched a crackdown against the presence of Roma in the country, but partially backed down after the European Commission warned that proposed measures could contravene an EU law, dating from 2004, guaranteeing EU citizens’ rights to free movement.
EU values
The Commission said today that the directive embodied fundamental EU values and set strict limits on the circumstances in which a foreign national from another EU state could be expelled. These include when someone is unable to financially support themselves, or poses a threat to public order.
It said that the directive required member states to pursue a “case-by-case approach” when evaluating whether to expel a foreign national.
Brice Hortefeux, France’s interior minister, said last week that France’s repatriation programme would lead to 700 Roma leaving the country by the end of August. Romani Criss, a Roma human rights group, has accused France of violating the European convention on human rights. “The expulsions are racially motivated,” it said.
France organised the repatriation initiative after Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, linked the presence of Roma in the country to recent violence in French cities.
Rachida Dati, a centre-right MEP for France’s ruling UMP party, warned today against linking “immigration and delinquency”. The former justice minister, herself from an immigrant background, wrote in the newspaper Le Monde: “Not all the immigrants and children of immigrants are potential delinquents.”
She defended the validity of Sarkozy’s suggestion that immigrants convicted of criminal offences might be stripped of their recently acquired French nationality, but she said that the debate that had followed was unhealthy.
