Romania’s anti-discrimination council, CNCD, on Monday fined President Traian Basescu 600 lei (about 130 euro) for saying that Roma/Gypsy people avoid work and make a living mainly by stealing.

Basescu made his comments back in 2010 at a news conference in Slovenia. Addressing the problem of Roma integration, he said: “Very few of them want to work … and traditionally, many of them live off stealing”.

In the first instance, CNCD declined to take up complaints about his comment, but it later reacted following a court ruling.

Roma activists welcomed the imposition of the fine. “It is an important, and even more symbolic, act of justice. We hope this decision will make other people stop discriminating against the Roma people,” Marian Mandache, from the Romani Criss Roma rights organization, said.

Basescu himself has not reacted in public about the ruling.

The President has a history of making such statements. In May 2007 he called a journalist who was filming him out shopping with his wife a “stinking gypsy” after she refused to stop filming him.

After the CNCD issued Basescu with a warning, he disputed this before the Appellate Court, which rejected his complaint.

Ambivalence over the Roma/Gypsy issue prevails in Romanian public discourse.

While TV stations and the print media almost exclusively use the term “Roma”, they still allow comments on their websites that refer in highly discriminatory and even offensive terms to “Gypsies”.

Polls show that over two-thirds of Romanians prefer to use “Gypsy”, mainly because they worry that “Roma” sounds like “Romanian”.

However, international Roma rights organizations insist that “Gypsy” is a pejorative and discriminatory term.

Romania is officially home to some 620,000 Roma, although it is widely believed that their real number is at least twice as large.

Many people of Roma origin do not declare their ethnicity on account of the widespread prejudice they face in Romania.

This article was produced as part of a project funded by the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation.