The Council of Europe’s anti-racism commission published its seventh report on Czechia on 27 October. ECRI’s team had been in the country the previous November, and by the standards of such documents the findings are warm. Some 300 police liaison officers for minorities, spread over 14 regional branches. A hate-crime specialist in each of roughly 80 prosecution offices. Sexual orientation added to the Criminal Code’s list of bias motives. A government commissioner for Roma affairs, and a president who speaks out about hate speech.
Then there are the numbers. Fifteen per cent of Roma pupils are taught outside mainstream classes, against 2.5 per cent of all pupils. Roma children are 3.5 per cent of primary pupils and 1.2 per cent of secondary ones. Some 130 schools have intakes at least 30 per cent Roma. The report notes another detail too: non-Roma parents sometimes press head teachers to keep it that way.
Sorting children by diagnosis
Everyone in the field knows the route. A Roma child is referred to a school counselling centre, assessed with methods Czech officials themselves call outdated, and sent back with a diagnosis of mild intellectual disability. The Education Ministry examined its own guidance centres in 2023 and found staff who still believed special schooling was where Roma children belonged. That is 19 years after the Strasbourg judgment in D.H., and 12 years after the European Commission opened infringement proceedings. Between 2021 and 2022 the share of Roma children taught outside mainstream classes rose from 12.8 per cent to 15 per cent.
The effect is cumulative. Half of Czech Roma finish their education at primary level, and 0.2 per cent hold a bachelor’s degree. Nearly half of those aged 16 to 24 are neither working, studying nor training. Segregation is not a side effect of that exclusion. It is how the exclusion is made.
Two judgments, one day
On 16 July the European Court of Human Rights ruled against Czechia twice in one day. In S.T. v. the Czech Republic it found violations of Articles 2, 3 and 14 over the death of Stanislav Tomáš, who was 46. Officers held him face down and handcuffed while one of them knelt on his back and neck for more than four minutes in temperatures above 30°C. Nobody checked his vital signs. The ambulance was called roughly three minutes later than it could have been. The body camera was never switched on. The investigation went to the same police hierarchy as the officers it was examining.
The facts are grim enough. The passage on motive is what makes the judgment worth reading. Racially motivated violence, the court said, “need not stem from openly articulated hostility” and “may arise from a broader culture of institutional racism”. In failing to ask whether bias had played a part, the investigation showed a “manifest lack of diligence”.
Political reaction at the time ran the other way. Before the autopsy results were out, the then prime minister, Andrej Babiš, thanked the officers on Facebook, saying they “did not have it easy”. The interior minister, Jan Hamáček, gave them his “full support”. The Criminal Police tweeted “No Czech Floyd”. The deputy ombudsman later found that nobody had watched over a bleeding, intoxicated man, nobody noticed when he lost consciousness, and nobody attempted resuscitation.
A second case, from Sokolov, never reached that stage. In 2021 a Roma woman was beaten by football hooligans with far-right links. Seven people were hurt, among them a 13-year-old and a deaf woman. She identified her attacker at the scene. The file was shelved all the same. Lawyers told the police at the outset that at least three of the five recognised indicators of bias were present. The specialists who agree with them have no power to insist.
Why nobody is answerable
The report’s real charge is against the system rather than against anyone in it. It does not allege a conspiracy. It describes a design. Expertise on hate crime exists, but as advice, and advice does not bind a local detective. The state treats hate crime as a security question, and the Interior Ministry’s aim is to marginalise extremists until they “cease to represent a security risk”. A neighbour who threatens a Roma family falls outside that definition. Of the anti-Roma incidents the OSCE recorded in 2024, nearly half had child victims, and many were carried out by neighbours. Antigypsyism, meanwhile, has become invisible by becoming ordinary: most Roma victims of hate speech do not report it, and without reports there is no data, and without data nothing to measure.
Housing, doctors and the paperwork
Housing repeats the pattern. ECRI was told again and again that rental adverts still carry the words “Roma, do not call”, and heard of no attempt to stop them. Roma life expectancy is 10 to 15 years shorter than the national average, and 22 per cent of Roma told the EU Fundamental Rights Agency they had faced discrimination in health care over the previous year. Compensation for forced sterilisation has come in instalments: of more than 2,300 applications, 889 women had been paid by April 2025 and 574 refused, usually for lack of records that hospitals had destroyed. In 2024 the Supreme Administrative Court held that the health ministry had lost sight of what the compensation law was for. The deadline now runs to January 2027. Redress moves, in other words, at roughly the speed of the injury.
A defence that always works
Every failure has an answer. Schools belong to municipalities, admissions are a local matter, budgets are tight. The National Recovery Plan selected 262 disadvantaged schools for support and, on the government’s own account, produced no substantial change in the classroom. The 2025 indexation law promises more money; ECRI was told the money had not arrived and the forms were enough to deter applicants. Local control is real. It is also where national commitments quietly expire.
Czechia does not deny its Roma problem. It writes strategies, trains officers, appoints commissioners and moves deadlines. What it will not do is treat the matter as urgent. ECRI gives Prague 18 months to carry out two priority recommendations: protecting Roma, LGBTI and Ukrainian pupils from bullying, and hiring enough Roma teaching assistants. Both are modest, cheap and uncontroversial. Whether they happen will say more about Czech seriousness than any strategy document, and will go a long way to deciding whether the next report reads like this one.
