Discourses of Roma anti-discrimination in reports on human rights violations

Abstract

In an effort to understand the paradox between the expansion of inclusion projects for the Roma and their persisting exclusion, this article explores human rights practice in order to grasp the complexity of meanings of inclusion negotiated in this practice. In this way, we scrutinize whether there are limiting factors within the inclusionary discourse itself. Specifically, we analyze the discourse in transnational judicial, political and civil society actors' reports on violations of human rights against Roma. A strong shared tendency to frame the violations in terms of discrimination can be discerned in the reports, demonstrating a dominant concept in the human rights discourse for Roma. However, a framing analysis of the underlying assumptions of this concept shows that not all three actors offer the same solutions for obtaining non-discrimination, which can partly explain the limited impact of the ostensibly strong and inclusive anti-discrimination discourse. In contrast, the actors do share a negative attribution of responsibility to the nation states, but the effectiveness of this shared discursive claim can be questioned. This article illustrates how inclusion discourses are actually quite complex to grasp and so it substantiates the need for greater critical understanding of such discourses in further research.