by Tomáš Zdechovský, Member of European Parliament
Believe in victory and victory shall believe in you.
Norway facing another criticism about taking Roma children
Norway likes lecturing other countries about human rights, while it has its own big problems with them. This time, the Council of Europe came with sharp criticism of Norway concerning extremely frequent use of foster care at a small local Roma community. According to the Council, 120 Roma children in Oslo between 6 and 15 years is either already in foster care or are threatened to be taken. In fact, it is around half of the Roma children living in Oslo.
The frost comes from Barnevernet
The Council of Europe´s report says that many Roma women in Norway no longer have the courage to even give a birth in hospital because they fear their child would be taken away. There are cases not only from the Roma community of mothers trying to commit suicide after their children have been taken away immediately after they gave a birth. Is the situation of many Romas in Norway, respectively in Oslo, so unbearable and worse than elsewhere that there is no other better solution than taking these children?
From the Czech point of view, it may seem that the practices of Barnevernet are known since the end of last year. But we can find public criticism of Barnevernet even much earlier. To recap, this is not the first time the Norwegian government has been criticized by international organizations.
Already in 2005, the UN observed with concern the increasing number of children placed in foster care. No need to say that since then the situation has even worsened, as evidenced by the theme of this article.
Not to mention the fact that according to the report, children see their biological parents only twice a year and they have lack of knowledge about their own culture and language. After all, we know this very well from the case of Eva Michalakova.
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