Hungary leads the way among EU Member States with regard to the implementation and comprehensive monitoring of the Roma Strategy and its effects, Deputy State Secretary for Social Inclusion Katalin Langerné Victor stated following the first two-day meeting on the Roma Strategy in Brussels.

The Deputy State Secretary said that after this event, further professional meetings would take place in the coming months. The EU’s Roma Strategy, according to which every Member State is to prepare its own national strategy, was agreed upon in 2011 during the Hungarian EU Presidency. Hungary was the first to submit this document, followed by the other EU members, after which an opinion was delivered by the European Commission.

Now that it is time to realise these proposals, the primary goal is to determine how it would be possible to monitor the implementation process in every Member State, the Deputy State Secretary said. At the meeting this week only a minority of the countries arrived with particular proposals, including Hungary, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Spain. Sweden is creating a mentor network to serve the interests of the target group, calling this process “bridge building”. This type of program already exists in Hungary on several levels, the Deputy State Secretary said, for example in local governments and kindergartens, and it has been initiated in other areas, such as healthcare, with the possibility of including members of the target group as mentors. Contact between the government sector and the social actors concerned will be ensured by the Roma Coordination Council.

(Ministry of Human Resources)