The Free Movement of the EU’s Most Deprived. Exception-making in European Union Human Rights

Abstract

THE FREE MOVEMENT OF THE EU’S MOST DEPRIVED Exception-making in European Union human rights application to Roma citizens

DRAGOȘ CIULINARU

Alongside discourses of 'migrant crisis' and refugee 'emergencies', the current EU public culture has experienced a re-emergence of the historical discourses about the mischievous and backward nature of the Roma. The main hypothesis of this thesis is that the free-moving European Union Roma citizens are subjected by the Member States and by EU institutions to a regime of exception. The indicators of this state of exception are sought in the existence of so-called Eastern European Roma camps, the repeated evictions, and the proliferation of discourses of Roma exceptionalism. In support of the hypothesis, the chapters document practices of segregation, policing, eviction, and aim to make salient the discursive strategies that justify such practices alongside the EU's human rights principles. The thesis investigates the tendency of national or local authorities to conflate the failure to comply with national legislation or with the conditions of free movement stipulated in the secondary EU legislation with an altogether loss of entitlement to the human rights applicable to EU citizens. This is one critical aspect that all the case studies in the thesis come back to while covering multiple years, multiple places, and triangulating between individual experiences and the local, national, and EU levels.