Roma in Sweden:
In 1999, the Roma received the official status of National minority in Sweden which grants particular rights regarding the use and preservation of language and the right to maintain and develop their own culture. The status comes with extra resources for national programmes revolving around language and culture, and extra leverage when civil society is to be consulted for different policies and actions. The Roma minority is officially made up of five loosely defined subgroups who have different backgrounds as to when they arrived in Sweden and some language and cultural variations but share a common experience of exclusion.
Key problems:
The Roma have been part of the population in Sweden since at least the 16th century. From early on they suffered persecution, expulsions, and stigmatising stereotypes. As the Swedish nation developed into a modern society, the Roma underwent a process of exclusion and marginalization which forced them to form a parallel society with its own social structure in order to survive. Even as late as the second half of the 20th century, the Roma were not allowed to settle or access schools, health care and jobs, and Roma women suffered from forced sterilisations. When the first efforts were made to include the Roma into Swedish society, the efforts aimed at extinguishing the Roma culture and forcing them to be assimilated into the majority society. With a new awareness rising in the new millennium and a new political agenda focusing on minority rights as part of human rights, the official policy started its shift towards the concept of inclusion instead.
Swedish national Roma strategy 2012-2032 “Romers rätt – en strategi för romer i Sverige” [Roma Rights – A Strategy for Roma in Sweden], Government Offices (in Sweden)
RCM Coordinator:
NGO coalition members:
RCM 2 (2021-2025) reports:
Roma Civil Monitor (2022) Civil society monitoring report on the quality of the national strategic framework for Roma equality, inclusion, and participation in Sweden. ENGLISH – SUMMARY IN SWEDISH
Poster presenting main findings of the report (2022):

RCM 1 (2017-2020) reports:
Roma Civil Monitor (2017) Civil society monitoring report on implementation of the national Roma integration strategies in Sweden: Focusing on structural and horizontal preconditions for successful implementation of the strategy. ENGLISH
Roma Civil Monitor (2018) Civil society monitoring report on implementation of the national Roma integration strategy in Sweden: Assessing the progress in four key policy areas of the strategy. ENGLISH
Roma Civil Monitor (2019) Civil society monitoring report on implementation of the national Roma integration strategy in Sweden: Identifying blind spots in Roma inclusion policy. ENGLISH