E/CN.4/1999/15 page 21 E. Discrimination against the Roma, Gypsies or travellers 80. The Special Rapporteur, in his preceding reports, drew the Commission’s attention to discrimination against the travellers. He has received information from the European Roma Rights Center assessing the situation. The Roma, or Gypsy, populations of Europe have long been victims of some of the harshest racial discrimination on the continent, as evidenced in the large number of the Roma exterminated during the Holocaust. Since the 1989 fall of Communism, and the subsequent liberalization of Eastern Europe, many of the safety nets which existed under Communism to ensure equal access to public services for the Roma have disappeared. Additionally, as low-skill jobs have become more and more scarce in the region, there has been a rise in violence directed toward the Roma populations. There are three broad categories of human rights violations confronting Roma in Europe today: police violence; racially-motivated violence by skinheads and other private parties; and systematic racial discrimination. 1. Police violence 81. Police violence targeting Roma occurs in almost all countries of Central and Eastern Europe; there are occasional cases in Western Europe as well. Police abuse is most pervasive in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Greece, Macedonia, Hungary, Ukraine and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Police violence takes two principal forms: police raids and custodial abuse. In some areas, the police make special raids on Roma communities - armed assaults in the early hours of the morning, during which houses are searched, the contents ransacked, inhabitants, including women, the elderly and children, harassed or subjected to excessive force, and men rounded up for arrest and questioning, usually without search and arrest warrants. In many cases, police officers readily admit that such raids target Roma communities, because Roma, as a group, are said to be prone to criminality. As recently as 27 and 28 October 1998, the police carried out two consecutive raids on Roma in the village of Hermanovce, in eastern Slovakia. In a similar raid on 29 June 1998, in Sruleti, in south-eastern Romania, a police officer shot 31-year-old Gabriel Mihai, seriously wounding him in the spine and leg. Police abuse of Roma in custody is widespread in Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia and Ukraine. Since 1992, at least 14 Roma men in Bulgaria have died after having last been seen alive in police custody, or as a result of the unlawful use of firearms by law enforcement officers. Fifteen cases of police ill-treatment have recently been documented in Hungary and 12 in Yugoslavia. As a rule investigative and judicial remedies are rare. 2. Violence by skinheads and others 82. Racially-motivated anti-Roma violence by skinheads and others is widespread in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Poland, Slovakia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In the Czech Republic, on 15 May 1998, skinheads killed a 40-year-old Roma man in Orlova; in Vrchlabi, a woman was thrown into a river and drowned. Another case is the alleged killing of Metodi Rainov, aged 15, who was reportedly thrown out of the window of a building by a skinhead after a group of skinheads attacked a structure where Roma children were known to spend the night. This event allegedly occurred on 15 May 1998,