Thank you very much indeed for the invitation. Let me express my appreciation to B’nai B’rith and to ARDI for taking the initiative to organise this meeting.

I have to begin, I am afraid, by agreeing with everybody who has already spoken: today we are not speaking of racism and discrimination as a risk in the time of COVID, but as a serious and growing reality.

Here at the Fundamental Rights Agency we know that from our work across the 27 Member States; we have research teams in every Member State and we are chronicling day by day, month by month, the human and fundamental rights implications of COVID and the public health and other responses. We publish our evidence in bulletins that we issue every month: the first one last month, the next one later in May.

But what are we seeing? We are observing particular minority groups experiencing particularly worrying challenges. Roma have been mentioned already but they must be mentioned again: Roma in many places in Europe are being blamed for the virus. They are subject to draconian lockdown when the virus is detected in their communities, lockdowns which would be frankly unacceptable in the general population. We have far too many reports of discriminatory profiling of Roma in the context of policing the lockdowns.

And when one explores the issue of intersectionality, we see some very serious problems with Roma, for example the intersectionality of poverty and being a member of the Roma community. We already heard from MEP Franz about the issue of hygiene and washing hands and lack of running water in so many places, but there is also the issue of children away from school, relying on distance learning when they do not have access to WiFi or computers.

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