Alex Soros on the European Civil Rights Prize of the Sinti and Roma

• Date
• October 23, 2025
• Speaker
• Alex Soros
• Location
• Berlin, Germany

Alex Soros, chair of the Open Society Foundations, gave remarks during a ceremony awarding George Soros, founder of Open Society, the European Civil Rights Prize of the Sinti and Roma. The award honors George Soros's decades-long commitment to championing Roma communities across Europe.

I'm deeply honored to accept this award on behalf of my father, George Soros, here in Berlin.

Berlin is a fitting place to celebrate this work: a city that knows, perhaps more than any other, both the cost of division and the value of unity after deep historical wounds.

I stand before you not only as the chairof the Open Society Foundations, but as a proud son, someone who has witnessed, from a young age, what moral courage looks like when it is translated into action.

My father's long-term commitment to the rights of the Roma is one of the things I've always admired most about him. As a child, I remember accompanying my parents on visits across Europe to meet Roma leaders and their families. Those experiences shaped my own commitment to human rights, and they remain with me every day.

My father's story begins here, in the center of Europe.

As a Jewish teenager in Nazi-occupied Hungary, his family went into hiding. They survived through the courage of others and the power of luck, while countless others perished. That experience instilled in him a profound sense of solidarity with all those that are persecuted for who they are. He precisely knew what that experience was like.

Years ago, when asked by Roma students why he chose to support them, my father answered: "As a Jew, I can empathize with the Roma."

A believer in Open Society, my father began his philanthropy in closed societies across the world South Africa and most famously in the former Soviet Bloc. Around the time of Perestroika and Glasnost, my father sensed an opening for work in his native Hungary and the Soviet Republics. But for him, and for the foundations, the period that many celebrated after the fall of the Wall, or the end of history, was brief. After visiting Sarajevo during the Balkan Wars, my father said something that proved prescient: "The march to freedom is over; it has been replaced by the specter of nationalism."

For my father and the foundations supporting the Roma, which he began nearly four decades ago, it was not an act of charity, but of solidarity. He called the situation of Roma in Europe, "the worst case of social exclusion." Having lived through persecution himself, he understood how fragile progress can be, and how the forces of division can return. The test for Europe's new democracies, would not be only be measured by their constitutions, but in how they treated all of their citizens.

Roma inclusion, he believed, was the litmus test for an open society. My father believed that "none of us are free until all of us are free." When the rights of one group are taken, it weakens the rights of everyone else. Too few see it that way today. They have retreated to zero sum thinking, that rights are like pie, (maybe that is too American). The larger the slice for others, the less to yourself, this view now ascendant across democracies is one of the things we must unite against.

Many think that Europe's rise in ethnonationalism was unleashed by the migration crisis of 2015. But in truth, the early warning came long before, with the rise in violence and discrimination against Roma communities in Hungary, in France, and across the continent. Those attacks were not isolated, they were the root of something deeper: the erosion of rights and the normalization of discrimination and persecution.

For nearly four decades, the Open Society Foundations have worked alongside Roma leaders, artists, and educators to build opportunity, freedom, and inclusion, from scholarships that helped form a new generation of Roma professionals, to partnering with European governments and the EU in support of their policy work, and to the creation of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture here in Berlin.

Today, we continue that mission through the Roma Foundation for Europe, which I'm proud to support. The [Roma Foundation for Europe] makes a simple but profound case: that the future of Europe depends on embracing the full participation of its Roma citizens-not as a question of charity, but of shared destiny. Roma make up one of Europe's youngest and fastest-growing populations. Their contribution to Europe's prosperity, democracy, and culture is not a burden, it is a source of strength. Investing in Roma youth, in their education and leadership, is both historically just and economically smart.

Because equality is far more than righting historical wrongs, it is about ensuring the vitality of Europe's future.

I want to thank the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma for their excellent work and partnership on creation of the ERIAC.

Last night I had the privilege of talking at length with Romani Rose. He told me of his family history of persecution and struggle for the recognition of Sinti and Roma holocaust. Today I salute his efforts that resonate with the efforts of the Foundations long-standing commitment to Roma.

It's my great honor to accept this prize, and I do so in the spirit of continuation, not completion.

In that spirit, we are directing the proceeds from this award to the Roma Education Fund, which supports the education and empowerment of young Roma students across Europe. They represent the next chapter of this work, the living proof that progress is possible when we choose solidarity over indifference.