... over 80 percent of Roma respondents live in households at risk of poverty, less than a third bring home a salary, and only 15 percent have been to high school, against 70 percent for the rest of the population.

The study concludes that Roma are “not sufficiently aware of the rights guaranteed under the legislation of the European Union”. Thus, only 40 percent of Roma know the laws that prohibit discrimination against ethnic minorities looking for work.

The range of measures will include: initiatives to develop better cooperation with refugee source countries, most notably with North African states; reinforce Frontex, increase surveillance of the Turkish-Greek border, and improve the management of migratory flows as well as more efficient procedures for deportations and to combat human trafficking.

The proposals have come at time when illegal immigration is the cause of growing concern in Denmark. However the newspaper also notes –

… according to the Ministry of Justice, we do not know how many illegal immigrants there are in Denmark. However, there is some justification for the worry that the large number of immigrants who are currently in Greece and Italy may decide to move north.

The measures are also justified for practical reasons, argues Marlène Wind of Copenhagen University, who is quoted by the daily –

Problems linked to illegal immigration are a threat to the single market and the European spirit of free movement. For this reason, it will also be a victory for the Danish Presidency to have the project implemented.

A week after its publication, this cover, along with an accompanying article that is discriminatory and racist, continues to provoke widespread criticism in the international press. The Central German Council of Sinti and Roma has complained of demagoguery and has demanded the weekly be withdrawn from newstands.

In Berlin, the Tagesspiegel has investigated the story behind the photo and discovered that Weltwoche, reputedly close to the populist Swiss right, took the picture out of its original context. The intention of the Italian photographer, Livio Mancini, Tagesspiegel writes, was to demonstrate the plight of Roma families in Europe -

Mancini photographed Roma children in the slums of the city of Gjakova in Kosovo, where their families washed up after the war. Their hovels are built on a toxic landfill, where they live off what they can find in the garbage to eat or to sell.... The series of photos of these children at the landfill is not depicting an isolated tragic case. The ten to 12 million Sinti and Roma are the biggest minority in Europe and live in the worst conditions. The majority are poor and threatened by pogroms. [...] Mancini’s photographs criticise this situation. (In Weltwoche) they were just twisted around to make the victims into perpetrators.

In an email to the Tagesspiegel Mancini denounces the “abuse of my photograph.”  Weltwoche has responded to the harsh criticism by defending its “facts”. “The abuse of children for criminal purposes”, the magazine declares, has been obscured by the controversy, but it avoids discussing its lack of “visual ethics”. Livio Mancini, nevertheless, is pleased that the theme of the poverty of the Roma has been brought to public attention.

In view of the threat “of the extinction of the Iranian people”, the Nobel Prize laureate notably insists that Berlin should refuse to supply submarines to Tel-Aviv, arguing that Israeli nuclear capability is “a danger to the fragile peace in the world”. At the same time, the writer offers less detailed criticism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he simply describes as a “loudmouth”. 

Grass, who shocked Europe with the 2006 revelations of his involvement in the Waffen SS, explains that fear of the “habitual verdict of anti-Semiticism” led him to remain silent for too long.

In Germany, controversy immediately followed the publication of the text, which featured on the front pages of three national dailies, including Die Welt, which headlined: “Günter Grass, the eternal anti-Semite”. The star columnist of the Berlin daily, polemicist Henryk M. Broder remarks –

Grass is the prototype of the educated anti-Semite, who is well-meaning when it comes to Jews. Haunted by feelings of guilt and shame and also driven by the desire to settle history, he is now attempting to disarm the 'cause of the recognizable threat.'

“Most countries in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe have seen qualitative losses in their democracies, their market economies and their political management in recent years,” says the foundation, which is very close to business circles. It attributes the change to political polarisation and some leaders’ hunger for power. Among the European states highlighted are Hungary (top of the rankings), Slovakia, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro, while Poland and, to a lesser extent, Serbia get better marks.

Italian daily La Stampa notes that an amendment proposed by the right (the majority group) aimed at deleting this point was defeated by 20 votes by the left, the environmentalists and the far-left. The Italian right, the paper says, condemns the "left's [decision] in favour of gay marriage". For Milan daily Il Giornale, "Europe wants to impose gay marriage on us". According to the paper, member states will be obliged to recognise same-sex marriages performed in other EU countries.

In a leader, however, the paper calls "for the abolition of March 8" –

 

It has gotten ridiculous to obstinately shine the spotlight, once a year, on one half of the world's population only to note that it is still not equal with the other half. The struggle for women's equality is a daily struggle, not just a struggle on March 8.

Certainly the year gone by has amply shown that women struggle on a daily basis and the Arab Spring put women centre stage who now pose a real challenge to the Muslim parties. "In Europe, in particular in France, women must not let their guard down a single day of the year," the article warns.

Taking France as an example, Le Monde notes that women remain under-represented in positions of political responsibility and in the category of high-level civil servants. Furthermore, the gap between men's and women's salaries remains at 25%. In short, Le Monde concludes, "the struggle continues," with or without March 8.

The proposed bill "is a strong sign of the times," says De Volksrant in a leader article. It notes that this is "a pressing social issue," even if the project has "no chance" of success. Members of government and the Christian-Democrats are "at the heart of power and impede all debate" on the issue, and "to keep the peace, the conservative VVD does not want this hot potato". The end result is that "while the issue is discussed in the society at large, the political discussion is frozen," the paper says.

In a self-assured and deliberately provocative text, the author responds to Sarrazin and takes issue with attempts to make the Turkish community a whipping boy for Austrian integration. As Die Presse explains, he then goes on to enumerate five reasons why Turkey’s influence in Europe is growing -

Turks are younger, more ambitious, and more numerous and their economy is growing more rapidly. Turks are better. […] In his book, Türkmen portrays a booming and vibrant Turkey that has many lessons to teach Europe. For example: the percentage of women executives in Turkey is six times the European average, prosperity has increased in Turkey more than it has anywhere in Europe, and as a general rule the Turks have more drive.

According to the Court, the Italian "push-back" policy in operation since 2009 violates international law because it deals with migrants collectively and denies them the right to appeal in Italian courts. Roberto Maroni, the Northern League interior minister at that time, has criticised the sentence as "political", while PM Mario Monti has stated that the government will study the ruling. But Il Manifesto is sceptical –

Deals with the new Libyan government point in the same direction as those cut with Gaddafi. To change this would require a thorough legislative overhaul and a new information policy. On reading online comments about the sentence, one realizes that Europe is now seen as a threat to our national integrity. This is the product of two decades of xenophobia and institutional hostility towards immigrants.

The paper explains that Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny, 64, and Belgian Baron Louis De Cartier De Marchienne, 90, were accused of not respecting safety measures, although aware of the dangers caused by asbestos, in their Casale Monferrato plant, located in northwest Italy. The plant produced construction panels made with asbestos fibres in the 1960-70s. Asbestos was banned in Europe in 1986 but production continued elsewhere.

Nearly 3,000 cases of asbestosis and of mesothelioma (a form of lung cancer) were recorded among the workers and the population and 1,830 people have died to date. This was the most significant trial ever organised concerning asbestos contamination and the first heard by a criminal court, stresses La Stampa. Editor-in chief, Mario Calabresi says the convictions -

... are the recognition of one of the most courageous and tenacious battles for truth and justice ever attempted in Italy. A battle thanks to which it was shown that, for years, [asbestos] production continued in spite of evidence of risk to an entire community. Now no one will be able to claim ignorance or manipulation. [But the decision] does not put an end to the story nor does it file this massacre away for good. Today there are at least 50 new cases of mesothelioma in the region, twice as many as ten years ago.

The Berlin daily notes that many of the shipwrecks in the Mediterranean “are not front-page news,” and illustrates its article with the photograph of a boat that sank off the coast of a Tunisian island with 700 Libyan refugees on board in June 2011.

Having enumerated a list of “the worst maritime catastrophes in the Mediterranean since 2006,” the Berlin alternative daily remarks:

Hundreds of thousands of people end up as anonymous corpses on the high seas or washed up on rocky beaches. Tens of thousands of refugees fall into the hands of the mafia in a crisis stricken Europe that has no room or humanity for them. [...] The dead are among us, whether from a luxury cruise ship or a trawler.

The migration bubble that grew during the last decade of [economic] splendour has suddenly burst, becoming a wave that has triggered a massive exodus of some half a million citizens.

According to a report released on 16 January by the National Statistics Institute (INE), net migration is negative (-50,090) for the first time in ten years, with  62,611 nationals and 445,130 non-nationals leaving in 2011. The main destinations for migrants are Morocco, Ecuador and Bolivia, followed by Brazil, France, Argentina, Germany, the United Kingdom and China.

The conservative daily blames part of Spain’s population decline to a declining birthrate, at 1.4 children per woman -

2011 was also the year that for the first time saw the average age for having a first child go over the barrier of 31.

The Berlin daily is referring to a bill that the Estonian Minister of Defence is hoping to have adopted in March. According to the text, all those who took part in the fight against the Soviet Union during the Second World War will be granted the status of “freedom fighters,” which includes Estonian members of the SS.

Previous attempts to push through the bill failed in 2006 and on 2010. This time around, "majority support appears to guaranteed,” reports TAZ. The Russian embassy in Tallinn has described the bill as “blasphemous,” while the German Green Party has criticised a "retrospective justification of the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler’s henchmen in the Soviet Union."

The Institute’s economists argue that:

… the interaction between migrant inflows and GDP emerges as positive, indicating that during periods of lower growth, migrant inflows are associated with ... slower [dole] claimant growth than would otherwise have occurred.

Over in Italy, employment is on the rise again after a 3 year fall triggered by the economic crisis, notes La Stampa. Latest data from the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) reports that jobs held by Italian citizens grew by 39,000 in the third quarter of 2011. Employment among immigrant workers, whose number has been steadily rising in recent years, continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace, up 120,000 jobs compared to 167,000 in the Q2 2011. Is it a positive signal of a progressive recovery from the crisis?”, asks sociologist Luca Ricolfi on the Turin daily –

I fear the answer is no. […] Something new is happening: after years of crisis, Italians are realising that they can no longer afford to retire early, to accept top level jobs only and hold out for better times. We are not yet seeing direct competition, but [employers] are reacting to the crisis by reducing the demand for foreign labour and [employees] not abandoning the jobs they hold. […] The apparently unstoppable rise in foreign employment now seems bound to slow down, if not to cease.

But the crisis is also prompting a growing number of Italian unemployed to give up looking for work, notes Corriere della Sera, quoting data from Eurostat’s Underemployed and Potentially Active Labour Force statistics. 2.7 million Italians, the highest in the EU, out of a total of 8.2 million, are available for work but not seeking it. The only countries where pessimism over employment prospects is still relatively low are Germany, France and Belgium.