Citizenship Rights of Gypsies in Turkey: Roma and Dom Communities

Abstract

This article compares two different Gypsy communities, the Roma community in Edirne and the Dom community in Diyarbakır, in terms of their access to citizenship rights (civil, social, political and cultural). The main argument is that in Turkey the Roma community has more access to citizenship rights than the Dom community due to the fact that the Roma community lives with Turks, the ethnic majority in Turkey, whereas the Dom community lives with Kurds, who are the majority in Diyarbakır but a minority group in Turkey. Further, the Roma community has closer connections with state and transnational space. The article explains how for both communities ethnicity is a common barrier to benefiting from full citizenship rights and why the equality principle of citizenship is ruptured for both communities.