Europe and Central Asia Summary of Amnesty International’s Concerns in the Region, January-June 2007 programmes to provide “housing care” to former occupancy/tenancy rights holder remained slow. According to the OSCE Mission to Croatia, approximately 8,500 applications for “housing care” were pending at the end of the period under review, despite pledges by the authorities to accelerate the processing of applications. Among those who had formerly lived in private properties, and who have formally repossessed their homes, some could not return because their homes had been rendered uninhabitable by looting and devastation. In May the Croatian Government adopted a Civil Service Employment Plan setting targets for the employment of members of minority communities in the public administration. Despite provisions in the Constitutional Law on the Rights of National Minorities providing for proportional representation of minorities in the State administration, progress in this area has been slow. Impunity for past serious ethnically motivated attacks continued, including the murder in 2005 of an elderly Croatian Serb man in Karin, near Zadar. To AI’s knowledge, no progress was made in the investigation of this crime. Discrimination against Roma Members of Romani communities in Croatia lacked full access to primary education, especially in geographical areas not covered by existing governmental and other programmes to promote the inclusion of Roma in education. Although “Roma only” classes were increasingly rare, Romani children still experienced discriminatory treatment because of teachers’ negative stereotyping and low expectations. Romani children with little or no command of the Croatian language faced extreme difficulties when they started school. The languages spoken by Roma in Croatia were not used in schools, unlike other minority languages. The majority of Romani children remained Amnesty International 39 excluded from pre-school programmes (see also AI Index: EUR 05/002/2006). In June a report supported by the Open Society Institute, a non-governmental organization, and the World Bank, presented an assessment of progress in implementing the objectives to which countries taking part in the Decade of Roma Inclusion have committed. Croatia ranked sixth out of nine countries which have joined the Decade of Roma inclusion. The report highlighted that the authorities have introduced a range of measures, especially with regard to education, which however remain sporadic and need to be integrated into more systemic policies. The report further noted that “Croatia does not have a systematic policy to deal with the challenges of improving the health status among the Roma population”. The Decade of Roma Inclusion is a regional intergovernmental initiative launched in 2005 “to reduce disparities in key economic and human development outcomes for Roma through implementing policy reforms and programs designed to break the vicious cycle of poverty and exclusion”. In May, in the case of Šečić v. Croatia, the European Court of Human Rights found Croatia in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Convention on Human Rights), prohibiting torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, as well as of Article 3 in conjunction with Article 14, the latter prohibiting discrimination in the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in the European Convention on Human Rights. Šemso Šečić, a Romani man, had been attacked in 1999 by two men who beat him all over his body with wooden planks shouting racial abuse and, as a result, had sustained multiple rib fractures. Following the attack, the Croatian authorities failed to promptly, thoroughly and impartially investigate this crime, whose perpetrators have remained unpunished. AI Index: EUR 01/010/2007