Thank you very much. I have to tell you honestly that I have the most difficult situation right now to be
as the first Chair of this Minority Forum and probably the youngest person in the room while I am a
woman, younger than others. And also a member of the Romani community.
When I started my job to work for human rights and protecting my people and create to help organise
minority education, I had a fear and I have also a fear right now because de-segregation and minority
education which affects my people's lives and our kid's future. It has a mixation in the world, not only in
my country. I thought when I was receiving this position that I only have information about my country
as a fear in terms of de-segregation and minority education, but I have to realise after this Forum that
that fear is not only for my country but for the others also. Integration and de-segregation as a word,
now I see how important it was in that time in Hungary and even if it was a couple of years ago the
government decided to make government de-segregation project for my kids, for my people, because
we have approximately 40% of our kids being segregated and another 25% being titled as
mentally-disabled like using the term of special education and special school system.
Me personally, I wouldn't be feeling bad myself we would call integration the whole process it serves.
But when we had a procedure of EU integration then people mixed the word the integration of EU
accession as a member state, and in the school curriculum or the other experts who were having
speeches in the word of integration relation to education and relation to EU procedures. But also in the
other terms having a big distances between those meanings. Minority education is very difficult to
manage, for example, to my people. While minority education, in my mind has to provide the cultural
and identity and the language curriculum to not let the world forgotten by those minority languages which
will be in the dangerous situation or is in the dangerous situation. It is very important to keep the
language not only for minorities but also for the world. But in the meantime, de-segregation why we
would like our kids to be having or receiving quality of education and comparing with minority
education comparing to my experience in my country the quality of education in minority education
system is lower than in the majority and the mainstream school. So that is why it is very dangerous for
those people who are creating policies each of the governments who are not having mixations of the
minority education and de-segregation.
So it was very very useful, I have to highlight one thousand times how important this UN forum to make
these differences between those two terms. The key word as I said before the quality of education and
of course keeping those importance together to protect human rights and to protect languages, minority
languages. In my job as a politician, of course I will work and I am working very hard to have the EU
rule for de-segregation to have equal chance for Romani kids because my population, 10 million, living
only in EU member states and nobody knows exactly how many we are living in the world. Only in 27
member states which is equal with my population, the Hungarian population, it is 10 million also. Why
we have that number and if you compare with other member states, I only have information about
member states but not all of them, it does not matter which country is economically in a good situation
or worse situation. Comparing, for example, Western European countries or the Eastern or newest
member states with the old member states. It doesn't matter. The Roma education fund and those
people who are working on de-segregation, are having the same challenge in each of the countries,