In the matter of the protection of the rights of the Roma, the anti-discrimination legislation in Romania is sufficiently comprehensive and in accordance with the Council Directive 2000/43/EC of June 29, 2000 implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons, regardless of race or origin ethnic, but does not practically touch all areas of public and private life; in recent years there has been an increase in the number of discrimination cases registered at the National Council for Combating Discrimination (CNCD), or handled by the courts, fact
which demonstrates an increase in the degree of knowledge or trust in national mechanisms for protection against discrimination. From the analysis carried out by the ANR, the major challenges persist in terms of the general public's knowledge of the legislation that protects them in cases of discrimination and of the rights they enjoy, the exercise of the rights by them, the implementation of the legislation by the law enforcement agencies law enforcement, especially in related cases of discrimination, hate speech or hate crimes, as well as the lack of specialized training of law enforcement agents, or the lack of specific protocols, which result in the lack of investigation or ignoring during the investigation the aspects related to the multiple or intersectional discrimination of some of the victims, for example ethnicity in correlation with age, gender, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity or expression, age, etc. reasons which, according to the law,
constitute aggravating circumstances.

In Romania and in the European space, anti-Roma attitudes are visible in the public space, in all spheres of daily life, a fact highlighted by the recent civil society reports, which recommend Romania and the other Member States to take measures to address multiple/intersectional discrimination and increase the dissuasiveness of the sections applied in cases of discrimination, develop national training programs to prevent and combat discrimination for representatives of public institutions and actively combat residual racism at the level of institutions and
anti-Roma attitudes existing in society. These objectives can materialize by cultivating, at all levels of public administration - local, county, central - a culture for non-discrimination, in favor of equality, acceptance of difference and respect for diversity.

The lack of active combating of anti-Roma attitudes is signaled by the civil society that monitors the implementation of anti-discrimination legislation. Thus, it is found that combating anti-Roma attitudes through the existing anti-discrimination legislation is not sufficient and that all four sectoral areas in the Strategy – education, employment, housing and health – must be accompanied by relevant measures that address and make explicit reference to anti-Roma attitudes. Moreover, they recommend the creation of tools to combat racism and xenophobia through
the means of criminal legislation, which would ensure that overt discrimination, hate speech and hate crimes against the Roma do not happen again; in this sense, the Council's Framework Decision 2008/913/JAI of November 28, 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia through criminal law was taken over in Romanian legislation. Such aspects are also supported and reported by the European Commission, which asks the EU member states to respond to these major challenges in the review of Roma inclusion measures, especially intersectoral, transsectoral and integrated approaches to eliminate multiple discrimination and multidimensional exclusion; analysis-based planning
the needs of Roma women and children and taking into account the existing diversity among Roma and the intersectional approach to the patterns of exclusion and discrimination faced by certain groups and subgroups among vulnerable Roma communities.

In 2019, the European Commission recommended to all Member States the recognition of anti-Roma attitudes, in order to promote a strong non-discrimination approach, in the framework of Roma inclusion interventions in all fields. This must include recognizing the particularities of anti-Roma attitudes, hate crimes and anti-Roma rhetoric, as well as the challenges faced by Roma victims in terms of access to justice, protection and assistance (such as under-reporting, including from the cause of the fear of discrimination, or of reprisals from the investigative authorities, the risks of revictimization, the impact of the biased attitudes of the authorities towards the measures provided by criminal law in response to crime, etc.).
Anti-Roma attitudes - Antigypsyism, in English -, or anti-Roma racism, as used by human rights activists, are recognized in the European space as a specific form of racism directed against Roma, Sinti and nomads, but also other groups that they are stigmatized, appealing to the deeply pejorative exonym "gypsy", widespread in the public space. The Roma and pro-Roma organizations gathered at the European level in the Alliance against Antigypsyism coalition proposed the working definition of the term antigypsyism, whose equivalent recommended by the ANR for use in Romanian in official documents is "anti-Roma attitudes", with the aim of avoiding the use of the term pejorative:
"Anti-Roma attitudes represent a persistent, historically constructed complex of accepted racism against social groups identified with the term
discriminatory "Gypsy" or other associated pejorative terms and includes:
• a uniformizing perception that defines and describes these groups of
the perspective of stereotypes and prejudices;
• Assigning these characteristics specifically to these groups;
• Discriminatory social constructs and the violent practices that flow from them, with marginalizing and degrading effects and that reproduce structural disadvantages.”

Measures to combat anti-Roma attitudes and strengthen anti-discrimination legislation:
Adoption in the Strategy of the definition recommended by the European coalition Alliance
against Antigypsyism and its operationalization in existing anti-discrimination legislation;

updating the criminal law provisions that sanction speech
incitement to hatred and crimes motivated by hatred with this definition, as well as conferring a dissuasive character of the applicable punishments by conferring the aggravating attribute on the anti-Roma attitude. Continuous training of law enforcement agents, prosecutors and judges in understanding the phenomenon and implications of anti-Roma attitudes, in the handling of related cases.
Strengthen legislation to effectively address multiple/intersectional discrimination in CNCD legal practice and increase the dissuasive nature of sanctions applied in cases of multiple discrimination. Development of national training programs to prevent and combat discrimination for employees in public institutions.
Actively combating widely accepted institutional racism by adopting the definition accepted by the Roma non-governmental sector at European level of anti-Roma attitudes and promoting their negative implications. Development of effective information and awareness campaigns in public institutions that provide public services in the fields of education, public health, employment, housing.
Information and awareness campaigns on the phenomenon and implications of anti-Roma attitudes in the private sector that deliver services to the population. ANR recommends that the fight against anti-Roma attitudes must have a preventive and a pro-active dimension, focusing on promoting a positive discourse about Roma in the public space, educating the majority of the population in this regard and increasing awareness of their negative consequences, on the model of knowledge and awareness at the level of society about the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and
the negative consequences of such forms of manifestation of racial hatred. According to the Report Summative evaluation of the model "First priority: No invisible child" (ANPDCA, UNICEF Romania, 2017) the analysis of the incidence of children's vulnerabilities according to ethnicity shows an increased incidence of some vulnerabilities among Roma children, who are more exposed to the risk of violence, abuse or neglect.

Action directions Non-discrimination

• Combating hate speech and anti-Roma attitudes generating speech inciting racial hatred or crimes motivated by racial hatred
• Public information and awareness of anti-Roma attitudes generating hate speech
• Analysis of the sanctioning cases in the field of combating speech inciting racial hatred with the potential to generate crimes motivated by racial hatred
• Continuous training for law enforcement agencies and magistrates in the field of anti-Roma racism
• Creation and dissemination of educational resources in the field of preventing and combating anti-Roma attitudes for public and private employers
• Organization of training courses for civil servants/contractual staff from the public administration in the field of preventing and combating discrimination
• Analysis of how existing anti-discrimination legislation is used in exam bibliographies or continuing education courses for public administration personnel
• Information and awareness in administration institutions that provide public services in the fields of education, public health, employment, housing
• Incorporating the provisions of anti-discrimination legislation into the internal documents of public and private employees, elements of racial, multiple, intersectional discrimination