Making a Difference for Macedonia’s Roma Community: CEU Alumnus Elvis Shakjiri Receives Anti-Racism Champion Award

CEU alumnus Elvis Shakjiri was recently honored as an awardee in the U.S. State Department’s 2024 Global Anti-Racism Champions Awards for his efforts to advance Roma rights and combat anti-Roma discrimination in North Macedonia. 

The award honored six civil society leaders for their exceptional courage, leadership and commitment to advancing racial equity, justice and human rights. Shakjiri is a founding member and Executive Director of Romalitico, an institute dedicated to Roma advocacy and has played a critical role in ending Roma statelessness.  

In recognizing Shakjiri at the awards ceremony on October 21 in Washington D.C., Secretary Antony J. Blinken said: “Elvis Shakjiri is a tireless champion for North Macedonia’s Roma community, who have faced generations of racial and economic injustice and are too often denied citizenship. Elvis and his group of colleagues started Romalitico to end the Roma’s statelessness. They’ve since registered hundreds of undocumented Roma, giving them access to government services, to education, to employment opportunities.” 

Shakjiri and fellow award recipients participated in an International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) October 17-26 in Washington, D.C. and New York City, where they engaged in knowledge exchanges with their U.S. counterparts. The program focused on advancing the human rights and fundamental freedoms of members of marginalized communities and combating systemic racism, discrimination, violence and xenophobia. 

Shakjiri graduated from CEU in 2015 with an MA in Human Rights from CEU’s Department of Legal Studies following his participation in the university’s Roma Graduate Preparatory Program and Roma English Language Program. He has helped numerous Roma navigate complex administrative systems to access social services and education, and his ongoing dedication to Roma people has led to legislative reform in Macedonia.  

CEU spoke with Shakjiri about his work against discrimination and how his studies at CEU have helped shape his trajectory in advancing human rights.  

What does this recognition mean to you?  

I'm so proud and honored that I received this award. It means a lot, not only to me, but also to my colleagues at Romalitico, as well as to the Roma community. I have been dedicated to the issue of combating discrimination for years, all the way back to my time studying at CEU in Budapest. That was actually how Romalitico was established. 

How did Romalitico begin and grow? 

Romalitico was established in 2013 with a group of students at CEU. We were six people coming from Macedonia and had different working experiences in our home country when we left to study. When we met at CEU, we discussed what we could do together for our community in Macedonia, even from afar.  

Our dedication to the Roma cause was strong, and we had a passion to serve our community. We gathered every week in the dorm discussing different Roma issues in our country, and we decided to use our academic experience. We started writing articles about the challenges and opened a blog. 

The idea was to do research and advocacy from Budapest, and then, once we finished our studies, to go back to our community in our country and officially register Romalitico as a think tank organization. Most of us came back in 2016-2017, and we did just that. At the time, we had institutional support from the Open Society Foundation, from the Roma Initiatives Office (now called the Roma Foundation for Europe). We had our own strategy and were primarily focusing on research and advocacy. 

In 2021, we started applying for different project funding related to our strategy and were successful especially with two mechanisms: One was the ROMACTED program funded by the Council of Europe; and then we received two USAID funding awards – Together for Prosperous Community and Roma Inclusion Activity. With these resources, we opened 20 local offices in 20 municipalities in the country.  

What are some of your current projects? 

Currently, one of the projects provides legal services from advisors to support cases coming from the Roma community. We have community mobilizers that work with people to raise their issues with local stakeholders.  

We also have business facilitators who are mapping unemployed Roma people. They follow different places of employment from the private sector and do job matching. So far, we have employed around 420 Roma people.  

We are also working on a project to register undocumented Roma. We have about 500 cases, so we have been advocating with members of parliament to adopt the necessary laws to make formal identification possible. So far, there have been changes to four laws, and we are now working to register those seeking documents. Receiving an ID card means these people can finally access basic services and have their rights recognized.  

In addition, we are doing infrastructural initiatives. We pave streets, put lights in public spaces in the Roma neighborhoods. We also renovate kindergartens, schools and playgrounds. We have a concept of green Roma neighborhoods, so we plant trees and put bins in the public spaces for garbage. Since the beginning of the activity, this program has completed 75 local actions in 21 municipalities impacting more than 36,000 citizens. The activity reconstructed eight public buildings; paved and reconstructed around four kilometers of pathways and streets; completed 10 environmental actions that engaged more than 350 volunteers; rehabilitated seven sewage networks with a total length of around one kilometer and installed 13 kilometers of public lights with solar power throughout Roma neighborhoods. So, this is our work. We have many activities, and, with our results, we can see that people are happy with what we are doing.  

How did your education at CEU shape your professional trajectory advancing human rights?  

If it wasn’t for CEU, Romalitico wouldn’t exist. If we were not there studying – the six of us from Macedonia – maybe we wouldn't have Romalitico and wouldn't be making these changes today. In terms of my MA studies, it was a very intensive one-year program, and I had a great supervisor Mathias Moschel. I met amazing students – colleagues from different countries, different backgrounds, people I am still in touch with today.  

What impacted me the most were the classes on critical race theory. In those classes, I learned about African American history and the system in the United States. I found myself often making a comparison with some of the conditions and phenomena within the Roma community. Parts of the history related to slavery and segregation were similar to our history of Roma people. Roma were slaves in Romania. We still have segregation in schools; and in several municipalities, during the summer in North Macedonia, Roma still face discrimination to enter the swimming pools.  

It was through studying critical race theory at CEU that I was able to look at how people addressed and solved some of the issues. I was always thinking how we can also approach these topics from our perspective on Roma issues. After taking these courses, I became aware that we really must work with institutions and pay attention to how we were making the arguments. We must not only argue why something is bad for the Roma community, but why it is actually bad for the whole society. Whenever we have issues to discuss, I think it's important to take that approach. 

What else would you like to express to CEU’s global community about becoming a changemaker in advancing human rights?  

John Shattuck, the President and Rector when I was at CEU used to say, “Go out and change the world.” He said this at my graduation ceremony where I was also the student speaker, and I think that message is important. In the CEU community, we are all change makers. We really change the world.  

And for those who are working with different populations and environments, I would say that passion is also key. We need to have the passion and motivation to sustain, and sometimes it's very difficult with various kinds of systemic oppression, threats from the state or other risks depending on the place. You can also be lifted by the motivation from the people who surround you.  

Our commitment is to transform the operations of our institutions and ensure that the needs of Roma are prioritized by the government. We aim to empower our Roma community to become agents of change, proactively exercising their rights and actively participating in society. This approach not only addresses immediate needs but also fosters long-term inclusion and empowerment. 

I think that CEU changed our lives, our opinions and the ways we look at things. This is not only my story, but also the story of several of the CEU colleagues who now work in the office here at Romalitico.