BUDAPEST, Hungary, Oct. 26 (UPI) -- Roma parents are at risk of having their children seized after a Greek Roma family's non-biological daughter was taken from them, a human rights activist said.
Greek authorities removed a 4-year-old blond-haired, blue-eyed girl known as Maria from a Roma camp after a DNA test found that the couple she was living with were not her biological parents.
On Friday, Bulgarian authorities confirmed that a woman named Sasha Ruseva, 35, is Maria's biological mother.
Two more blond-haired, blue-eyed Roma children were also taken from their families in Ireland this week, but were returned after DNA tests confirmed their parents were biological.
Dezideriu Gergely, a human rights lawyer and executive director of the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest, said that Roma families, also known as Gypsies, are under persecution because of their mixed ethnicities, The New York Times reported.
"Imagine if the situation were reversed and the children were brown and the parents were white, would they have ever been taken away?" said Gergely, whose father is Roma and mother is white. "The most dangerous consequence of the hysteria is that now we have to live in fear that our children can be removed from us on the basis of a wrong perception. No one should be profiled on the basis of their ethnicity."
