We do not want to inactivate the law but to make human use of it

Meunster / Germany (RNN Correspondent) 18.04.1998

"If the law is not effective for Roma", then Volker Maria Hügel of the Refugee Council announces resistance. Moreover, the German laws deprive the Roma of their rights. After some Roma had demonstrated against the deportation to former Yugoslavia on Wednes day, the representatives of numerous organisations formulated their demands.

At the same time approx. 100 Roma loudly drew the attention to their demands, when the new accommodation wing of the North Rine Westfalia institute of the fire brigade was opened, a ceremony in which also the minister of the interior, Franz-Josef Kniola, participated.

Hügel called the arguments of the City of Münster for the deportation of Roma to Macedonia and Kosova cynical, when they say that there exists a medical system.It is at the same time wellknown that Roma are not permitted to this system. Reynir Vailhjamsson (organisation for support of asylum seekers) asks of the City to do everything "even up to civil disobedience" to stop further deportations. However, Spyros Marinos (Foreigners Council of the City) said that he has noticed that all chances to obtain the right to stay for the Roma are being exhausted.

Anna Laumeier (Procedure information place) regerets that so many people are sent back who have been living here for 8 or 10 years and who have become "integrated".

Brigitte Derendorf of Amnesty International demanded a complete deportation stop to Kosova, "a crisis place with a disastrous situation of human rights".

The GAL-representative Stefan Riese appealed to the town council to judge the UNO-human rights convention higher than the Foreigners Law. In four Dutch places they have decided this way and no Roma finds himself compelled to leave the country.

"Our hope is a political solution", says Alexandra Hippchen of the Protestant Student Community (ESG), "with which the law will not be outsmarted but applied decently.

"It is inhuman when mothers have to tell their children who were born in Germany that they do not belong here".