From the founding of the Committee on the Genocide of the Roma in 2009, to the adoption of the working definition of antigypsyism/anti-Roma discrimination in 2020, the genocide of the Roma has remained crucial to the IHRA’s mandate. In Article 4 of the 2020 IHRA Ministerial Declaration, Member and Liaison Countries of the IHRA pledged to “Remember the genocide of the Roma. We acknowledge with concern that the neglect of this genocide has contributed to the prejudice and discrimination that many Roma communities still experience today.”
As a follow-up to this pledge, the 2021 Athens Plenary tasked the Committee on the Genocide of the Roma to develop recommendations on teaching and learning about the genocide of the Roma, which would provide a practical tool to overcome the lack of knowledge of this genocide in mainstream society and to help counter anti-Roma racism/antigypsyism and discrimination. This was also one of the IHRA's three pledges made at the Malmö International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism, Remember – ReAct.
The project, set up to carry out this task, is led by the IHRA's Committee on the Genocide of the Roma in close interdisciplinary cooperation with the experts from the IHRA's other Working Groups and Committees, its Permanent International Partners, and in dialogue with Roma civil society actors and representatives.
The project team is led by Misko Stanisic (EWG/Serbia, Project Chair) and Nina Krieger (MMWG/Canada, Project Deputy Chair), and includes IHRA experts from the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as representatives from the Council of Europe ADI-ROM, OSCE/ODIHR, the United Nations, and the EU Fundamental Rights Agency.
