Competing Conceptions of Dignity in Roma Rights Activism

Lilla Farkas looks at the conceptions of dignity by European and US actors in the transnational Roma rights network. She shows that long preceding the dilemma the Charlottesville incident brought to light in the US, Roma rights lawyers in Europe stood for the equality of a racialised minority in its quest to curtail hate speech. They did so in defiance of the US constituents of the Network, who favored liberty over equality, a collision Risa Goluboff argues is perhaps “not for the law to resolve”. Conversely, when it came to forced evictions from segregated housing US actors urged non- action for basic human dignity so as not to compromise a broader struggle for equality (integration). In lieu of Roma rights lawyers of Roma origin, hard decisions on balancing US and European conceptions of dignity on the one hand and the interests of the socio-economically very different Roma ‘classes’ on the other fell to Roma activists. While the Roma activists at the regional level fortified by the international legal elite aligned their agenda with US legal liberalism, domestic actors stuck to European conceptions of social justice. Revisiting Derrick Bell’s classic take of ‘serving two masters’ Farkas sheds a different light on the agency dilemma. In this case study the political liability of elite activists and lawyers is contrasted to their domestic counterparts. Ultimately, domestic lawyers instrumentalised the fundamentally decentralised nature of the transnational practice field to counterbalance the demands of resourceful constituents, trading off professional acknowledgement while fighting for dignity on their clients’ terms.