Minister of Human and Minority Rights, Public Administration and Local Self-Government Milan Markovic, Deputy Ombudsman Goran Basic and Chief Representative of UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Serbia Eduardo Arboleda signed an agreement to help the Roma national minority enter data in birth registry.

Markovic told a press conference that according to various analyses, there are between 2,400 and 6,000 legally invisible persons in our country.

The Minister said that the signed document envisages the establishment of closer cooperation between the competent institutions in activities aimed at assisting the Roma in entering data in birth registries.

The activities will include interviews with people in the Roma settlements and inviting them to visit the centres for social work and register their place of residence, so as to be able to provide birth data to the registrar.

The Minister said that activities to assist the invisible people will start with concrete actions aimed at children without parental care, children in foster families and other socially vulnerable groups.

A coordination group to be set up of competent staff from the Ministry will be in charge of concrete steps to be taken within next month, said Markovic.

He also announced amending the Law on extra-judicial proceedings, which be round up a legal framework to resolve the issue legally invisible persons.

The signing was also attended by Deputy Head of the EU Delegation in Serbia Adriano Martins, who said that this is an important step forward towards achieving solutions for people who are invisible and have no legal documents.

Martins said that the problem of legally invisible person exists not only in Serbia, but also in the EU countries, where there are eight million people who have problems with the registration of births and do not have the necessary identity documents.