[An Nahar] Roma communities around Europe are being stereotyped and scapegoated in the wake of recent child abduction allegations in Ireland and Greece, the head of a Roma rights organization said Thursday."We urge the media and authorities not to assign collective responsibility to Roma communities on the basis of individual cases," Dezideriu Gergely, director of the European Roma Rights Center, (ERRC) told Agence La Belle France Presse.
The cases had encouraged stereotypes such as "Roma communities steal babies" and an attitude that "Roma are guilty until proven innocent", he said.
Authorities should avoid racial profiling and act on the basis of evidence rather than perception, he added.
A seven-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy were each removed from their biological Roma families in Ireland this week after public tip-offs that later proved to be false.
The removals sparked warnings about racial profiling following the case of a blonde girl found in a Roma camp in Greece who was unrelated to the people she was living with.