When certain politicians inflate fears … that’s very frightening”

Name and shame and bring to courts and make parties exclude those members. If the commissioner for human rights is helpless, it shows that we only pay lip services.

“The EU has the Digital Services Act. It has the AI Act. These are two decent pieces of legislation. They’re good. They need to be enforced. And that’s where I would watch closely what the EU is doing to make sure that these instruments are promoted and enforced.”

He added: “And [it’s important] that we challenge the disinformation about regulation. There’s this myth out there that it’s these instruments, and that type of regulation, that stifles innovation in Europe. There’s no evidence for that.”

Seems like he is using the Roma to push the acceptance for those acts instead of using the acts to protect Roma.

For his part, O’Flaherty simply points out that racism is a main driver of Roma discrimination.

In my opinion it’s not race but values. I assume that many Roma don’t want to be mindless consumer drones and don’t buy into the pacifying narrative that life is all about buying a house and driving a nice car.

This clashes not only with individual Europeans and their assumptions about life plans but also the EU itself. Supposedly we can all live together peacefully, but differences in value preferences make that difficult. If we would have a truthful debate about Romas we would have that debate about all cultures and many would start questioning the membership in the EU.