Sites and the scales of the law: Third-country nationals and EU Roma citizens

Abstract

To the question, why have they been permitted for so many years to live in the house they have illegally occupied in the French Banlieue, Elena (Roma from Romania) answers by telling about the kind of deal they have made with the existing Rathaus (town hall). She and her family take care that no other Roma family settles there and they can continue occupying the house. They are the watchdogs against the Roma of the land which they themselves have occupied illegally. During the roundtable meeting at the Sankt-Marien Church in Berlin on 28 May 2009 with a group of Roma, the authorities at city and communal level tried to explain the EU law on freedom of movement and the conditions for a residence permit.. (conditions of work) above 90 days of residence for those EU citizens like the Roma, who come from a new member state. One of the Roma women found this to be a ‘stupid law’, to which the representative of the Stadtrat fur Soziales at the communal level responded by saying that ‘it is the EU law and the federal law, which one cannot ignore’. The Roma woman replied, ‘it is your task as a politician to change it’.. and added that, ‘the laws are made by people, they can be changed, and should be changed when they cause inhumane hardship..’ The Roma who were EU citizens present at this meeting demanded asylum seeker status and one of the authorities explained its impossibility by saying that ‘it would have been still possible before Romania’s accession to the EU, [then] you could have applied for asylum’, but this was no longer possible ‘since then legal circumstances have changed through the accession of Romania to the EU’. In the picture, 19-year-old Jetmir Kreyeziu, who took asylum in a church in Goettingen together with his three other brothers (23, 17 and 12-years-old) is holding a photo of himself as a very young child. They took refuge in a church after they escaped the police forces on the way to the airport for deportation. The photograph was taken when Jetmir came to Germany. In the photograph, Jetmir is looking directly at the camera. Now, he is finishing his ‘Realschulabschluss’ [high school diploma] in Goettingen. He refuses to leave for Kosovo.