The Ukrainian government will have to pay damages totaling 177,000 euros to 16 Roma victims of a racist pogrom in the village of Petrivka in Odesa Oblast in 2002, according to a Nov. 6 ruling by the European Court for Human Rights.
The court found that the Ukrainian law enforcers failed to prevent the pogrom, which drove the Roma people out of their homes, and didn’t investigate the incident properly. In addition, the court said some local authorities were complicit in the ethnic violence by being prejudiced against the Roma and supporting the expulsion of the Roma from the village.
The journey to justice was difficult and long, taking sixteen years, and involving multiple court claims and an unfinished probe by Ukrainian police. Two plaintiffs died in the course of the litigation in the European Court for Human Rights.
In September 2002, the murder of an ethnic Ukrainian teenager allegedly by a Roma man sparked outrage in the village of Petrivka in Odesa Oblast. The residents demanded the expulsion of the Roma from their village, and the village council supported the decision.
The mayor and the local police warned the Roma residents about the planned expulsion and advised them to leave the village. On the same day, the houses of the Roma residents were cut off from electricity and gas supplies. Then a crowd of several hundred people ransacked the houses and destroyed the belongings of the Roma.
Police officers at the scene did not intervene as the Roma people were driven out of their homes.
District police opened an investigation into hooliganism, but quickly suspended it due to their inability to identify the perpetrators. Seven years later, the case was reopened and suspended again for the same reason. The Roma victims filed a claim in a district court, but when the Budapest-based NGO European Roma Rights Centre took the case in 2010, that claim had not yet been heard by the court.
In 2005, some of the victims filed a civil claim for damages at the district court against the local administration and the village council, but the claim was rejected. Another lawsuit against the police for inaction during the pogrom was sent back and forth between two courts, both of which claimed that the other had jurisdiction.
“It is totally unacceptable that the victims of a pogrom in 2002 had to wait until 2018 to get justice,” Jonathan Lee, communications coordinator for the European Roma Rights Centre, which represented the Roma victims in the European Court for Human Rights, said in an email to the Kyiv Post.
He said recent attacks on Roma people in Ukraine had caught the attention of European and international bodies. This year, a series of anti-Roma pogroms by far-right groups left two Roma people dead, several injured, and dozens displaced from their destroyed camps.
“This case, though severely delayed, should serve as a wakeup call for the government of Ukraine about how cases like this should be dealt with by the police and legal system,” Lee wrote.
According to research by an Odesa-based non-governmental organization Desyate Kvitnya, institutional racism and prejudices against Roma people remain high among Ukrainians, including judges, law enforcers, and state officials, leaving Roma people denied justice and deprived of their rights.
