No voice, no future? Roma ignored as Europe goes to polls

Europe's 10 million Roma badly underrepresented at a time when populist forces are trying to villify communities

Pata-Rit is just a few miles outside Cluj-Napoca, in north-west Romania, but it feels a world away from the pretty streets and baroque architecture of the bustling city centre. Here, rubbish from the city and region is deposited in vast mounds, and the air is thick with the smell of rotting waste.

About 1,800 people call Pata-Rit home, almost all of them of Roma origin, living in depressing and unsanitary conditions in a makeshift camp backing onto a landfill site. Many were evicted from housing in the city centre and forced into the camp's crowded huts.