Civil Society’s assessment becomes part of European Commission’s reporting on Member States’ progress in Roma inclusion

Civil society’s assessment of Roma inclusion policies in the EU member States is part of the European Commission’s recent 2019 Report on the implementation of national Roma integration strategies. Country-specific and thematic summaries of the civil society reports are now available at the Roma Civil Monitor webpage. 

Every year, the European Commission produces communications to the Council and the European Parliament to inform about the progress made by the Member States in implementation of their National Roma Integration Strategies (NRIS), developed following the EU Framework for NRIS published in 2011. Previously, the reports on implementation were based only on governments’ own reporting and self-assessment. In 2018, the European Commission published an external evaluation of the EU Framework for NRIS, and in 2019, included also information from civil society reports produced within the Roma Civil Monitor pilot project by more than 94 civil society organisations and experts from 27 Member States.

The Center for Policy Studies at Central European University, which has coordinated the Roma Civil Monitor pilot project since 2017, has now published the comparative data from the two first monitoring cycles in easily searchable format – fiches disaggregated by countries and by themes, including substantive thematic areas(education, employment, healthcare and housing), horizontal measures (such as anti-discrimination, fighting racism or specific needs of the most vulnerable groups among Roma) and structural measures (such as stakeholders’ involvement, civil participation or data collection).

The EC 2019 Report draws from several sources of information; beyond the Roma Civil Monitor reports, these include reports from Member States’ National Roma Contact Points (NRCP), data on the situation of Roma from the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) and a Meta-evaluation on Roma inclusion interventions produced recently by the EC Joint Research Centre.