In its December ruling, the Supreme Court wrote that Roma children who have attended or attend a primary school in Stará Ľubovňa - Podsadek, north-eastern Slovakia, are the victims of discrimination, and overturned the previously issued rulings in the case.
The valid ruling is a major win for the Centre for Civil and Human Rights, a non-governmental organisation. For seven years the Centre has been battling the Education Ministry and the town over the situation in Podsadek, a borough where mostly Roma people live. In 2015, the organisation turned to a Bratislava district court, claiming that children in the Podsadek school were segregated. The court disagreed.
Now, the Supreme Court’s civil senate, on which the judges Jana Bajánková, Jana Halušková and Jozef Kolcun sit, said that the defendants violated the principle of equal treatment “by not taking sufficient preventive measures to protect Roma children against discrimination” in the school on the basis of their ethnic origin.
