Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras met with a delegation of Greek Roma at Maximos Mansion on Monday to celebrate International Romani Day, which is on April 8.
”The effort to raise citizens’ awareness on issues relating to Greece’s Roma communities should be constant” the Greek PM stated. He added that ”there are no second-class citizens in Greece, where significant steps have been taken by the current government to support Roma citizens in a period of fiscal difficulty.”
Tsipras referred to the Greek state’s efforts to mobilize Roma communities and integrate them into the economic life of the country.
The Greek government has initiated efforts to monitor how the 371 communities of 110,000 Greek Roma citizens live, in order to adjust the appropriate polices to the population.
In his remarks, Tsipras highlighted the importance of free education for all, noting that every Roma child needs to go to school because “education is a basic right, but also a condition for these communities to acquire their rights in the future.”
“There are no first, second or third-class citizens. We are all children of the same God,” Tsipras noted during his speech.
The Romani people are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally itinerant, living mostly in Europe and the Americas. Estimates about their global population vary from two up to twenty million people.
With information from A.M.N.A.
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