Child trafficking in the countries in the western Balkan, besides the numerous legal and practical measures taken throughout the years is still on the rise. The COVID-19 pandemic made the children even more vulnerable to child trafficking due to the increasing economic uncertainty, unemployment and limiting of movement. This was emphasized today on the first day of the two-day regional conference "Joint Action in the Western Balkans to Protect Children from Trafficking and Exploitation", organized within the joint program of the European Union and the Council of Europe "Horizontal Facility for the Western Balkans and Turkey" 2019-2022”, which was attended by more than 130 participants from the region and beyond.

The children from the Western Balkan countries are a subject to trafficking from different reasons of exploitation: sexual exploitation, including production and distribution of content which contains sexual abuse of children, forced marriages, labor exploitation, forced begging and forced criminal activities.

Video footage from Teplice, Czech Republic is being massively shared through social media of a police intervention against a young Romani man who later died in the ambulance called to the scene. Romani community members are comparing his death to the death of George Floyd, the Black man who was murdered by police in the USA last year.

One of the intervening police officers kneeled for several minutes on the Romani man's neck. The young man later died in the ambulance called to the scene by police.

Police say their intervention was not the cause of death, but that the drugs the Romani man is said to have used were the cause of death. Michal Miko, director of the Romanonet organization, has posted online that what the video shows is "The height of brutality." 

Michal Mižigár, a Romani student of history and Romani Studies who won the Aspen Central Europe Leadership Award in 2019 from the Aspen Institute Central Europe, commented that the footage shows "The Romani Floyd today in Teplice!" Recalling the attack on Romani children at a summer camp run by the Romani musician Ida Kelarová and the death of a Romani man in police custody inside a pizzeria in Žatec, he added: "I feel genuinely powerless and sad. This is not the first case."

Link: http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/romani-man-dies-after-czech-police-kneel-on-his-neck-they-say-drugs-caused-his-death.romani-activists-see-parallels-to

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