The right to free movement of Roma in France: Power dynamics in the meta-field of human rights

Although mobility is celebrated as a core aspect of EU inclusion, exclusionary tendencies hinder the practice of this mobility substantially when it concerns Roma migrants. In the summer of 2010, this limited mobility was reflected in the evictions of Roma from their dwellings and their expulsions from the French territory. Interestingly, this incident provoked outrage across Europe and the European Commission threatened to launch an infringement procedure with the EU Court of Justice, which would have been a breakthrough in protecting the right to free movement of Roma. However, this procedure was eventually suspended, after which the ngo Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) brought and won the case before the European Committee of Social Rights. This paper aims to study the shift from the condemnation given by the European Commission to the decision of the European Committee of Social Rights, and in particular its reflection in the French media. We want to understand the power dynamics at play in this case, and assess to what extent the human rights paradigm was able to influence the media contestation about these evictions and expulsions of Roma migrants. We argue that the sociology of human rights approach is ideally suited to study this case, as it defines human rights as a social practice, with specific discursive and power dynamics. Particularly, some studies within this approach conceptualize human rights as a meta-field, in which different elites coming from various social fields come together and compete for the authority to establish a symbolic universal meaning of human rights. We analyze the French newspaper media discourse on the incident from July 2010 (start of the evictions and expulsions) until July 2012, more than six months after the decision of the European Committee, and ask the following questions: How did the (judicial, political, activist and media) actors position themselves in the meta-field of human rights contestation in the media? How did the meta-field of human rights as represented in the media relate to the other fields to which the actors were linked? The main conclusion is that the meta-field of human rights as represented in the media was dominated by both the national and the European political field, while the real impact of the decision by the European Committee can be strongly questioned, as it was almost not discussed in the media. Interestingly, a political conflict with Vice-President of the European Commission Viviane Reding politicized the incident, without bringing the human rights paradigm more forward. The media discussions were mainly held on the relations between the national and European field and on the position of the European Commission and Reding within this field. We claim that the observed politicization of this human rights incident in the media is an important finding, as it illustrates the generally weak influence of the human rights paradigm on the media contestation concerning the right to free movement of Roma migrants.