A Hungarian school unlawfully segregated minority Roma students for years, the country’s top court said in a final ruling on Tuesday, granting 100 million forints ($310,000) in compensation to the children’s families.
Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is at odds with the European Union for his perceived erosion of the rule of law, hinted in January that the state should disobey any court order to pay restitution to the Roma and provide training instead.
The Kuria (Supreme Court) case involved an elementary school in Gyongyospata, a town that has been a flashpoint of ethnic tensions in the past.
“The supreme legal forum upheld... (an earlier) ruling which mandated a 100 million forint damages payment,” the Kuria said in a statement. “Students from the Roma ethnic minority were unlawfully segregated and given substandard education.”
The ruling was a “bad decision which upends social peace as it unilaterally and overhwelmingly punishes a whole town for the real or imagined grievances of a minority”, Laszlo Horvath, Orban’s special envoy on resolving Roma issues, told national news agency MTI in a video message.
