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Roma appeal against discrimination on Holocaust Day

The first Roma guest of honour at Germany's official Holocaust remembrance day ceremony has said his people face new threats.

Zoni Weisz told German MPs that Roma in western Europe again faced discrimination and were living "in inhumane conditions in ghettos".

The Dutch-born speaker is the sole survivor of a family killed in 1944.

He was speaking on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by Soviet troops in 1945.

The majority of Holocaust victims were Jewish but historians estimate between 220,000 and 500,000 Roma also died.

West Germany did not formally acknowledge this different genocide until 1982, the BBC's Stephen Evans reports from Berlin.
'Still shut out'

Addressing the German parliament, the Bundestag, Mr Weisz singled out France and Italy as countries where Roma faced new "discrimination and exclusion".

"We are Europeans, let me remind you, and must have the same rights as any other resident, with the same opportunities available to every European," he said....
Read entire article at BBC News