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call for input | Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

Call for Inputs: Romani Memory Map in the Americas

Issued by

OHCHR

Deadline

15 July 2024

Purpose: OHCHR announces the re-opening of its open call for contributions to a Romani Memory Map in the Americas, a crowd-sourced initiative done jointly with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO); Laboratorio de Estudos sobre Etnicidade (LEER /Universidade de São Paulo), Brazil; Gonzaga University, USA; and the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia; Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as with Roma human rights defenders and Roma civil society organisations throughout the Americas and beyond.

Background

The UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence has dedicated increasing attention to questions of memorialization, in which he observed:

“… the crucial role played by memorialization processes in the context of transitional justice, which is fully recognized by the rules and standards of contemporary international law. The work carried out on these past violations serves as a basis for reflection on the present and identification of contemporary issues related to exclusion, discrimination, marginalization and abuses of power, which are often linked to toxic political cultures. Positive work in the area of memory not only helps to build democratic cultures in which human rights are respected but also fulfils the legal obligation of States to guarantee human rights.”

Antigypsyism has contributed to the history and memory of the Romani people to be erased from public spaces and/or misrepresented by collective memory. This phenomenon has had strong negative implications on the human rights of Roma. In September 2022 and May 2023, OHCHR convened a global meeting on Roma and memorialization, as well as a follow-up meeting on Memorialization as a Strategy to Tackle Antigypsyism in the Americas.

The Romani Memory Map initiative also aims to contribute to the upcoming 80th anniversary commemorations of International Roma Holocaust Memorial Day on 2 August 2024, which commemorates the anniversary of the August 2-3 liquidation of the “Zigeunerlager” in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and the killing by the Nazis of several thousand Roma over the course of one night.

Click here to view the map

Learn more about OHCHR’s work on Roma rights

Next Steps

How to contribute to the elaboration of the Romani Memory Map?

The Romani Memory Map is a collective, crowd-sourced project. Anyone can join the initiative and an open call for collaboration is made public. To contribute, participants need to fill out a Outlook form, proposing a Romani Memory Pointhttps://forms.office.com/e/NUDmRP8aBm

Full details of the Roma Memory Map are available in English, Spanish and Portuguese

Accepted languages: English, French, Spanish, Romani and Portuguese.

The new deadline for submitting proposals is 15 July 2024. The map will be progressively updated.

Inquiries to: aline.miklos@un.org

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