A/HRC/40/64/Add.1 35. The Special Rapporteur visited two Roma communities during his mission. He was disheartened to witness the continuing cycle of poverty and the difficult living conditions, with little access to services most people in Slovenia would consider normal. While real progress was being made and pride was evident in one of the communities visited, as the academic success of children in the community school reflected, the Special Rapporteur was also informed that this unfortunately remains the exception rather than the rule in the approximately 130 Roma settlements in Slovenia. In some areas (such as Novo Mesto), no improvement had been seen in recent years despite the efforts made at the national level. The lack of political will from the authorities was described as one explanation for the failure to take comprehensively and systematically the steps necessary to address the root causes of these issues. Most parties acknowledged that the main obstacle faced by Roma communities was the informal nature of their settlements, and consequently their lack of security of tenure with regard to their homes and property, while led to restrictions on their rights to adequate housing and to water and sanitation. 36. Under Slovenian law, access to services is accorded on the basis of ownership of or some other legal claim over property, together with requisite planning permission. In a special report published in 2012, the Ombudsman noted the inability or unwillingness of municipalities to address the issue of the security of tenure in Roma settlements in southeast Slovenia. The report was followed in 2015 by a call to the national Government to take responsibility for ensuring greater compliance with constitutional and international human rights obligations by municipalities, such as by providing municipalities with financial aid in regularizing Roma settlements. In 2010, the Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation noted that as much as 49 per cent of Roma lived in barracks, containers, trailers or other makeshift accommodation (A/HRC/18/33/Add.2, para. 32), and that about 21 of 95 Roma settlements in Prekmurje and Dolenjska had no access to water, and that many did not have access to sanitation either. This situation also has a serious negative impact on the Roma children who attend and remain in school, with consequent knock-on effects in terms of social exclusion, illiteracy, lack of skills and qualifications, poverty and high unemployment rates. As already mentioned, the lack of disaggregated data on ethnicity in Slovenia makes it difficult to assess the predicament of the Roma, although some unofficial sources presented during the current mission suggest their rate of unemployment is as high as 98 per cent. 37. Despite some measures aimed at facilitating the regularization of Roma settlements, including amendments to the Construction Act that should ease some of the requirements for securing tenure, some of the parties that met with the Special Rapporteur had the impression that those measures would make little change. 38. Given the extremely serious wide-ranging consequences of the discriminatory denial of access to drinking water, sanitation and social services in general, and the subsequent effects in areas such as education and employment, State authorities should play a much more direct and proactive role if Slovenia is to comply fully with its international and constitutional human rights obligations with regard to the Roma minority. The prohibition of discrimination is in itself clearly a sufficient legal imperative to allow the State to intervene in areas of municipal competence, particularly sanitation and water. 39. While this particular dimension was the one most frequently raised during the Special Rapporteur’s mission, other issues of concern for the Roma communities in Slovenia were brought to his attention, including the very low rates of schooling of Roma children, the apparently ongoing assignment of Roma children to special classes or schools, and the need for more appropriate forms of pedagogical engagement in the classroom. Roma seem to be the subject of much reported hate speech and incitement to violence. Access to health care and other social surfaces remains difficult owing to, inter alia, the high rates of illiteracy and in some cases to the relative isolation of Roma settlements. 40. The situation on the ground must be appreciated in order to reach a better understanding of the obstacles that members of the Roma face in some communities. For example, there have been reports of water cisterns installed in 2016 in one settlement by national authorities to ensure access to drinking water. Since the cisterns were not always filled regularly, people were forced to use water from a polluted stream for drinking or bathing. The results were predictable, given that children are particularly susceptible to 9