quality:corruption, stylistic:tone, information:extraction
Contemporary issues

In Europe, Romani are associated with poverty, high crime rates, and behavior that is considered antisocial or inappropriate by the rest of the European population. Partly for this reason, discrimination against the Romani has continued to be practiced to the present day, although efforts are being made to address it.

Amnesty International reports continued to document instances of Antizigan discrimination during the late 20th century, particularly in Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Kosovo. The European Union has recognized that discrimination against Romani must be addressed, and with the national Roma integration strategy they encourage member states to work towards greater Romani inclusion and upholding the rights of the Romani in the European Union.

In eastern Europe, Roma children often attend Roma Special Schools, separate from non-Roma children; these schools tend to offer a lower quality of education than the traditional education options accessible by non-Roma children, putting the Roma children at an educational disadvantage.

The Roma of Kosovo have been severely persecuted by ethnic Albanians since the end of the Kosovo War, and for the most part, the region's Romani community has been annihilated.

Czechoslovakia carried out a policy of sterilization of Romani women, starting in 1973. The dissidents of the Charter 77 denounced it in 1977–78 as a genocide, but the practice continued through the Velvet Revolution of 1989. A 2005 report by the Czech Republic 's independent ombudsman, Otakar Motejl, identified dozens of cases of coercive sterilization between 1979 and 2001, and called for criminal investigations and possible prosecution against several health care workers and administrators.

In 2008, following the rape and subsequent murder of an Italian woman in Rome at the hands of a young man from a local Romani encampment, the Italian government declared that Italy's Romani population represented a national security risk and it also declared that it was required to take swift action to address the emergenza nomadi (nomad emergency). Specifically, officials in the Italian government accused the Romanies of being responsible for rising crime rates in urban areas.

The 2008 deaths of Cristina and Violetta Djeordsevic, two Roma children who drowned while Italian beach-goers remained unperturbed, brought international attention to the relationship between Italians and the Roma people. Reviewing the situation in 2012, one Belgian magazine observed:

On International Roma Day, which falls on 8 April, the significant proportion of Europe's 12 million Roma who live in deplorable conditions will not have much to celebrate. And poverty is not the only worry for the community. Ethnic tensions are on the rise. In 2008, Roma camps came under attack in Italy, intimidation by racist parliamentarians is the norm in Hungary. Speaking in 1993, Václav Havel prophetically remarked that "the treatment of the Roma is a litmus test for democracy": and democracy has been found wanting. The consequences of the transition to capitalism have been disastrous for the Roma. Under communism they had jobs, free housing and schooling. Now many are unemployed, many are losing their homes and racism is increasingly rewarded with impunity.

The 2016 Pew Research poll found that Italians, in particular, hold strong anti-Roma views, with 82% of Italians expressing negative opinions about Roma. In Greece, 67%, in Hungary 64%, in France 61%, in Spain 49%, in Poland 47%, in the UK 45%, in Sweden 42%, in Germany 40%, and in the Netherlands 37% had an unfavourable view of Roma. The 2019 Pew Research poll found that 83% of Italians, 76% of Slovaks, 72% of Greeks, 68% of Bulgarians, 66% of Czechs, 61% of Lithuanians, 61% of Hungarians, 54% of Ukrainians, 52% of Russians, 51% of Poles, 44% of French, 40% of Spaniards, and 37% of Germans held unfavorable views of Roma. IRES published in 2020 a survey which revealed that 72% of Romanians have a negative opinion about them.

As of 2019, reports of anti-Roma incidents are increasing across Europe. Discrimination against Roma remains widespread in Kosovo, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic, against which the European Court of Human Rights has ruled in Romani advocates' favor on the subject of discriminatory and segregationist education and housing practices. Roma communities across Ukraine have been the target of violent attacks.

Roma refugees fleeing the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine have faced discrimination in Europe, including in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Moldova.

Concerning employment, a 2019 report by the FRA revealed that, across the European states that were surveyed, on average 34% of Roma men and 16% of Roma women were in paid work.