A Voice For the Voiceless

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The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

Avoid Eviction Trauma Say MPs

British MPs Send Petition to Basildon Council on Behalf of Travellers
By Grattan Puxon
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contacts: Grattan Puxon, Secretary, Dale Farm Housing Association (01206 523528)

May 16, 2008: Up to 40 MPs of all parties in the British Parliament are expected to sign a letter calling upon Basildon Council not to carry out its planned eviction of Dale Farm.

Their appeal comes on the eve of a ruling in the UK High court in a judicial review of Basildon's decision to spend around five million euro bulldozing 132 homes in Britain's largest Gypsy township.

Yesterday (7 May)  at a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Gypsy and Traveller Law Reform held at the Palace of Westminster, one speaker after another drew attention to the possible coming catastrophe of a forced eviction of the Dale Farm settlement, near Crays Hill, Essex.

President of the Gypsy Council Richard Sheridan spoke of the fears of the elderly and the inevitable trauma which would be caused to children if the long-planned eviction was at any time allowed to go ahead.

"For us this is ethnic-cleansing", Sheridan told MPs and supporters gathered in a committee room at the House of Commons. "We'll never give up the fight for our human rights."

Becky Taylor, author of Travellers and the State, a study of relations between Gypsies and the authorities over the past hundred years, said Dale Farm was a test case. Her book, launched this week, filled a gap in Traveller history but another needed to be written on the resistance to oppression shown by Travellers, she said.

Romani journalist Jake Bowers said the state had been trying to wipe out the Gypsy way of life since his people first arrived in England in the middle ages. "They hanged us under the Egyptian Act and I still feel the noose is around our neck," he commented.

Bowers said Roma had survived the Nazi genocide and were now at 12 million strong the largest minority in Europe. However, they had a long struggle ahead to obtain equal rights and a proper place in European society.