Policy Center for Roma and Minorities the Fundamental Rights Platform meeting

April 16th, 2011

On 14 and 15 April, Policy Center for Roma and Minorities participated to the 4^th annual meeting of the Fundamental Rights Agency’s (FRA) Fundamental Rights Platform (FRP) in Vienna. The FRP is a network for cooperation and exchange organised by the FRA to structure its dialogue with the civil society.

The meeting brought together around 180 civil society representatives from all Member States of the EU and working across all themes included in the Agency’s Multi-Annual Framework.

A large proportion of the meeting was dedicated to interactive workshops and networking opportunities, as well as knowledge exchange between civil society organisations and FRA experts.

Lunch was structured around ‘Talking Tables’, with 15 tables dedicated to specific themes, such as human rights education, violence against women, the rights of persons with disabilities, and rights of the child as well as some cross-cutting issues, such as communications. FRA experts working in these areas were present at each table to respond to questions about the work of the FRA and to listen to suggestions by civil society.

Policy Center for Roma and Minorities participated to the table dedicated to Roma issues, where two sensitive topics were discussed with Mr. Michail Beis, FRA representative and representatives of different NGOs: the census in several EU countries and the recently launched European Framework Strategy on Roma Inclusion. The focus of the discussions was the role of NGOs and FRA in these initiatives, as well as NGOs suggestions for the monitoring and implementation of the European Framework Strategy on Roma Inclusion.

The entire afternoon of day one was allocated to “The Floor Is Yours”, an innovative forum where FRP participants were given the opportunity to present ideas, projects and issues of their choice. Over 30 different sessions took place, with themes ranging across all areas of the FRA’s work.

During this forum Policy Center for Roma and Minorities presented the progress of the REACT campaign, focusing on the  main objective: challenging negative attitudes towards Roma. Our message was that there is a need for piloting new ways of challenging negative attitudes towards Roma as we also presented our approach and activities in this respect. The audience was very interested while the debate following the presentation focused on the sustainability of our initiatives.