Blonde, therefore not Roma The greatest harm of the latest anti-Roma media bubble is to divert attention from the human-rights catastrophe under which Europe’s Roma live.

In recent weeks, hysterical media reporting about cases of alleged Roma crimes – the purported kidnapping of “blonde” children in Greece, Ireland and Serbia, and the grooming of girls and boys from Croatia to rob in Belgium, France and Germany – has fuelled a wave of racist hostility that threatens to intensify discrimination and violence against Europe’s most vulnerable minority.

Sadly, the facts do not seem to matter. Following the media hue and cry that erupted in Greece, Irish police removed a seven-year-old blonde girl and a two-year-old blond boy from their Roma parents – apparently for no reason other than their mistaken belief that a Roma child could not have light skin or fair features. They returned both children, after DNA tests confirmed their parentage.

More bad judgements have followed. In Greece, a prosecutor ordered an emergency nationwide investigation into all birth certificates issued over the past six years, after reports that families were defrauding the state by declaring births around the country. A New York Times headline asked, employing language it would never use with respect to other ethnic groups, whether the Roma are “primitive or just poor”.

In short, the bubble of lurid – and so far false – stories of Roma child-theft feeds an ever-present undercurrent of stereotyping, racial hatred and sheer blindness to the humanity of a people that has long justified policies of subjugation and segregation.

I have experienced the depths of this sentiment at various times since the 1990s – in Romania, where even stalwart rights defenders have without the slightest hesitation referred to Roma as “dirty Gypsies”; in Hungary, where taxi drivers repeat freely to anyone who will listen the inherent criminality of Roma; and in the Czech Republic, where Roma have been barred from restaurants and walled off from parts of towns.

Nor is racial animus limited to the banal interactions of everyday conversation. On the contrary, it is expressed – intentionally so – at the highest levels.

Just three years ago, in a blatant attempt to undercut the appeal of the right-wing National Front, French President Sarkozy ordered his government to expel all Roma immigrants. Last month, France’s interior minister, Manuel Valls, declared: “This population has a style of life that is extremely different from our own and is in conflict with it.” The starkly dehumanising quality of those words – positing a ‘conflict” between “this population” and “our own” – speaks volumes about a worldview that excludes Roma from membership.

In the end, the greatest harm of the latest anti-Roma media bubble is to divert attention from, if not to justify, the human-rights catastrophe under which Europe’s Roma live: massive unemployment; widespread poverty; separate, sub-standard education; and, just in the past few months, repeated outbursts of violence against Roma from Belgrade to Milan and eastern Slovakia.

If the cycle of false reporting, exaggeration and racially hyped reaction is to end, it will require political leadership of a kind that is currently absent. In recent years, Europe’s governments have spewed forth numerous declarations of good intent to address the plight of the Roma. European law has incorporated rhetorically powerful prohibitions against discrimination. And the European Court of Human Rights has, in a series of landmark cases, condemned the common practice of relegating Roma children to second-class schools. But these words have not translated into improvements on the ground.

When push comes to shove, European officialdom has been found wanting. Two years ago, when French officials were caught lying to cover up the explicit targeting of Roma for expulsion, the European commissioner for fundamental rights, Viviane Reding, famously said, “Enough is enough,” and pronounced herself “personally convinced that the European Commission will have no choice but to initiate infringement action against France”.

But no action was brought. Two months later, when the spotlight had moved elsewhere, the Commission quietly let the matter drop.

The election of a new European Parliament and European Commission in 2014 during a time of unprecedented austerity hardly seems an auspicious moment to ask for political courage on behalf of a despised minority. But that is exactly what is needed.

James A Goldston is executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, which has supported litigation aimed at fighting anti- Roma discrimination in Italy, Russia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic.