World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples

The 2002 census recorded 535,140 Roma (2.5 per cent of the total population) but other estimates such as the European Commission (2004) and UNHCR (2004) both put the Roma as numbering between 1,800,000 and 2,500,000. Sixty per cent of Roma speak Romani and/or Romanian, the remainder Hungarian, German, Turkish or Bulgarian. Most Roma in Romania are Orthodox Christians, but some are Catholic or Protestant.

Roma remain under-represented at national and local levels, but EU integration and the engagement of domestic and international civil society organizations have kept their problems on the Romanian agenda. An important development remains the Decade of Roma Inclusion, initiated by the World Bank, the Open Society Institute and the Hungarian government in summer 2003, to which the Romanian government has signed up. It is set to run from 2005 to 2015 and has four priority areas: education, employment, health and housing, and two cross-cutting areas, gender and non-discrimination. To date, however, the record been mixed. In 2005 the government estimated that around 50,000 Roma lacked identity documents, which made efforts to tackle such problems as inadequate housing and unemployment that much more difficult. A new National Employment Plan, approved in August 2006, provided targeted action for minorities, including Roma, and the administrative capacity of the National Agency for Roma improved in 2006 as regional offices were being developed. However, implementation is slow and the social inclusion of the Roma remains a problem; overall living conditions are still inadequate; unemployment of Roma remains high; police abuse against Roma is a persistent problem; many Roma children still face de facto segregation at school, and forced evictions continue.

In 2007, Romania's most senior officials offered reminders of the deep hostility towards Roma that still permeates much of Romanian society. In May 2007, President Traian Basescu called a reporter ‘a stinky Gypsy', a comment judged defamatory by the National Council for the Fight against Discrimination. Then in July, Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu was reported to have made remarks generalizing Roma as criminals.

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