Ghent Roma also file criminal complaints against Conner Rousseau | Domestic

In September, Rousseau allegedly made racist statements about the Roma community to some police officers on a café terrace in Sint-Niklaas. In concrete terms, he urged the police to use the baton against people from that community, some of whom, according to Rousseau, are causing a nuisance in Sint-Niklaas. “The statements were serious, clearly racist and incited to violence against the Roma community,” Janetta Danyiova said in the newspaper.

Rousseau later confirmed those “wrong statements”, which he dismissed as “crazy nonsense”, at a press conference. “He thus confessed to the facts, even though he tried to minimize and simplify them through his drunkenness,” Danyiova said in ‘Het Nieuwsblad’. “We, Roma, cannot simply ignore these facts. We believe that a complaint is very well-founded to protect our human and fundamental rights.”

In the meantime, Rousseau had already had a conversation with representatives of the Roma community in Sint-Niklaas, which went smoothly. That same day, the Brussels non-profit organization Kham, which represents members of the Roma community, filed a criminal complaint against Rousseau.