Emeritus Professor, The University of Texas at Austin 

Hon. Vice-Chancellor, International Roma University, Delhi 

Director, The Romani Archives and Documentation Center (RADOC) 

Prof. Dr. the Honorable Ian F. Hancock, OBE FRSA, anav romano O Yanko le Redjosko, is one of the few remaining Roma that spoke at the First World Romani Congress in London in 1971.  

In April 1978, the Second World Romani Congress took place in Geneva.  There, a petition was drafted requesting admission to the United Nations for Roma.  In late November Hancock went with three others—including IRU honorary president Yul Brynner—whose mother was Romani—to New York to deliver that petition personally.  By March, 1979 it had been accepted.  Roma were admitted to the United Nations Economic and Social Council and the Department of Public Information, and given NGO status as a non-territorial nation (like the Palestinians and the Kurds at that time, or the Jews prior to 1948).  Hancock was later able successfully to petition for representation in UNICEF, and in 1993 once again spoke before the ECO-SOC Assembly to request elevation to the consultative status.   

As the UN Delegate for Roma, a position he held until 2009, he has represented his people before the United States Congress, the CIA, the European Union and other organizations in Washington, New York, Geneva, Brussels, Warsaw and elsewhere.  Until 2009 he served as North American member of the Vienna-based Roma Parliament.  He has toured Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic as an attaché of the U.S. State Department to prepare reports on the post-communist increase of Romaphobia in those regions.  At the personal invitation of Swedish Prime Minister Persson, he spoke with Kofi Annan and 47 other world leaders at the International Forum on Racism and Xenophobia in Stockholm in 2002; at the invitation of the Dutch government’s Commission on Justice and Peace he presented a report on Romanies at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.  

Together with the late U.S. Senator Paul Simon he organized an international seminar entitled “Addressing the Plight of the Romani People” at the Public Policy Institute at The University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale.  He gave the opening address and introduced Senator Hillary Clinton at an international conference on the situation of Gypsies at Columbia University.  In 2002 he received a personal invitation from His Holiness the Dalai Lama and visited him at his home in Dharamsala in India.  Working with Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, he is chairman of the Romani Education Fund, Inc., awaiting release of the “looted Swiss assets,” money secreted by the Nazis in Swiss banks and now being released to its claimants.   

In 1981 he received a Certificate of Merit from Yeshiva University in recognition of his human rights work; the following year he was given the Human Rights Day award from a national Bahá’í Association.  In 1997, he flew to Norway to accept the prestigious Rafto Foundation Human Rights Prize, known in Scandinavia as the “alternate Nobel Prize,” and in that same year was awarded The University of Wisconsin’s Gamaliel Chair in Peace and Justice.  In 1998, President Bill Clinton appointed him as the sole Romani member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.  Since then, he has been placed on the Vienna-based International Romani Parliament as its North American representative, has received a resolution “as an expression of high regard by the Texas House of Representatives” for his work and an honorary doctoral degree, with distinction, from Umeå University in Sweden and another from Constantine University in Slovakia. West Chester University in Pennsylvania created “The Ian Hancock Graduate Fellowship in Holocaust and Genocide Studies” in 2003.  

The “Ian Hancock Roma Education Centre” was established in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2010 and in 2017 the “Ian Hancock Romani Archive and Culture Centre” was opened in Mersin, Turkey. In 2009 he was nominated to the Texas State Commission on Holocaust and Genocide. In 2019 Queen Elizabeth II awarded him The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire which he received in Buckingham Palace in April for his work for Roma human rights. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2020.  In 2023 he was made Recipient, Premio de Investigación, Instituto de Cultura Gitana, in Madrid, Spain, and was awarded the Kultur- und Ehrenpreis der Sinti und Roma, VDSR, in Mannheim, Germany.  He is a member of a number of national and international Holocaust-related organizations. 

In retirement, he now works tirelessly fighting for Romani civil and human rights, and for full and honest acknowledgement of both the genocide of his people in Hitler’s Third Reich, and for the over five centuries of slavery in Wallachia and Moldavia. 

He has authored and/or edited over 400 publications, including The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution (Karoma Publishers, 1987), Roads of the Roma: A PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers (Hertfordshire UP, 1998), A Handbook of Vlax Romani (Slavica Publishers, 1995), and We Are the Romani People (UHP, 1995).   

A collection of his essays edited by D. Karanth entitled Danger! Educated Gypsy was published in 2010 by The University of Hertfordshire Press. Two documentary films, one American and one Swedish are in production detailing his work and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center; a third is in discussion at the Rafto Foundation offices in Bergen, Norway. 

Jacqueline Hazell,  

The Monitor 

19-5-23