News that Swedish police have kept an illegal registry charting members of the Roma community and their families has sparked outrage from Sweden’s integration minister and from representatives of the Roma community.
“This is upsetting, to say the least,” Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag told the TT news agency. “Registration based on ethnic background is illegal and does not belong in a society based on the rule of law.”
The registry was exposed on Monday by the newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN), which revealed that 4,000 Roma are listed by local police, in a database that consists of a family tree that includes personal identity numbers and addresses combined with arrows that indicate how people included in the registry are related.
The registry is reportedly kept in a computer file folder labelled “itinerants” within the computer system of police in Skåne in southern Sweden. Police confirmed that the registry exists on Monday morning, after initially denying it, but added that the registry was not sanctioned by the police.
“This is horrible. It is an illegal kind of treatment that the police are carrying out here,” Fred Taikon, who works for the É Romani Glinda journal, told TT. “It’s forbidden to make a registry of people based on their ethnicity - and our authorities have done just that. This is an incredible breach of the law. It’s dumbfounding.”
He added that he had “long suspected” that police had such a registry based on reports from others in the Roma community.
TT/The Local/og
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