Cultural discrimination

In a 1996 poll cited in the US State Department's human rights report, 35 percent of Czechs favoured "concentrating and isolating the Roma" and 45 percent supported "moving the Roma out of the Czech Republic if possible." Voicing stereotypes common throughout Europe, Czechs claimed that Roma, with their traditionally large families and mostly unemployed, were a drain on the social service budget and people's taxes, and lived better than some Czechs with jobs. They regarded Roma as dishonest and often criminal. While some Roma have become successful entrepreneurs, the community as a whole suffers from an estimated 70 percent unemployment, illiteracy, poverty and health problems.

In the Czech Republic, the so-called Jirkov Decree of December 1992 empowered that municipality to dislocate persons from their residences without a judicial order or other legal action or court decision primarily because of violations of norms and regulations for hygiene. This would surely have facilitated and simplified the process of getting rid of the "unadaptable ones", predominantly the Gypsies. Many other cities attempted to issue similar decrees. That eventually inspired the proposal of an extraordinary anti-immigration bill in the Czech Parliament, which in many aspects went even further than the local decree of Jirkov; e.g. it instructed citizens to contact a registration office if they wished to accommodate in their flats persons without permanent residences of their own, while police officers and other qualified persons would have been entitled to enter homes and inspect them. Ultimately the bill did not pass in the parliament, but had been discussed; this fact alone clearly expresses the negative attitude toward the Roma.