Are gypsies really the greatest problem Europe is facing? Fringes of society: A Roma girl plays outside her family's caravan at an encampment of Roma families near Paris. The cluster of Roma, handcuffed and caged-in behind glass walls, listened in silence as prosecutors accused them in court of selling child brides for up to about $US270,000 ($280,000) in cash, valuing them based on their ability to steal. One 20-year-old witness told the court he had stolen about $600,000 in cash and jewels for his parents, or more than $7000 a month, since age 13. At the top of the network was a 66-year-old grandmother. Mystery girl: The child named Maria by Greek authorities. Photo: Hellenic Police The case highlighted an increasingly rancorous debate in France and across Europe about what some politicians call, rather ominously, the "Roma question," a reference to the nomadic people, also known as gypsies, who came to Europe from India centuries ago. An estimated 11 million Roma are scattered across Europe. There are thought to be about 25,000 Roma living in Australia. At a time of fiscal austerity, European policymakers are raising a thorny question: after centuries of persecution and living on the fringes of society, can the Roma ever integrate into Western Europe? This month's trial intensified that debate when members of the defence team offered an unusual legal defence: rather than focusing on the argument that the Roma were forced to resort to crime because of poverty and discrimination, it claimed that in some cases they were simply following age-old Roma traditions and generally operated outside the norms of society in "the style of the Middle Ages." Fears: Sashka Ruseva, shown to be Maria's mother. Highly publicised protests erupted in Paris and several other French cities recently, following reports that police officers had detained a 15-year-old Roma girl, Leonarda Dibrani, in front of her school friends and deported her to Kosovo with her family, who had been living in the Doubs region of eastern France as illegal immigrants for five years. The government has pledged to investigate the circumstances of their expulsion and last week President Francois Hollande offered to allow Leonarda to return to France, but not with her parents and five siblings. The girl initially rebuffed his offer, saying she did not want to return without her family. But on Tuesday, she said she was still deliberating. The Roma have also been under the microscope in the past week, with accusations of child abduction after Greek authorities removed a child from a family to which she bore no resemblance. Eleutheria Dimopoulou: Interrogated over custody of Maria. Photo: Greek Police The family claimed that the child - called Maria by authorities - had been left with them by another Roma family that had left Greece years earlier. Officials were sceptical because the girl had blonde hair and light-coloured eyes uncommon among the Roma. An impoverished Bulgarian woman then came forward to say the child could be her daughter. Sasha Ruseva, 35, said that she had given birth to a girl in Greece "several years ago" but had been forced to leave her baby behind because she could not afford to take her home. Christos Salis: Interrogated over custody of Maria. She said she had given birth to a girl in Greece, but had been forced to return to the family home in Bulgaria following the departure of one of her eldest daughters. She left the child behind as she could not afford to support her. "I do not know whether she is mine or not," Ruseva said of Maria. We had a child. We left it in Greece as I had nothing to feed her. I did not take any money. Iancu and Loredana Muntean, whose son was removed by Irish authorities but returned after DNA tests. On Friday, DNA tests confirmed she was the mother of Maria. Greek hospital birth records also emerged showing that a girl had been born to Ruseva on January 31, 2009 - the same date given as the birthday by the Greek Roma couple who claimed Maria as their own. Before the DNA tests were conducted, Ruseva said she was ready to take back Maria if the girl proved to be her daughter. It also emerged that Irish authorities had removed a seven-year-old girl from a Roma family last Monday in Dublin and a two-year-old boy from his family in Athlone on Tuesday. However, both were later shown by DNA tests to have been in the custody of their biological parents. Both had been removed from their families by authorities because they did not resemble their darker-haired parents or siblings. Removed: Leonarda Dibrani and her family soon after they were deported to Kosovo from France. That such stories are so swiftly believed is testament to the low opinions the Roma people are held in in the minds of many Europeans. Last month, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls, a Socialist, caused a furore by saying that only a minority of Roma could fit into French society, implicitly suggesting that those that couldn't should leave. The far Right National Front has warned of Roma flooding the country and has made them a key issue in advance of municipal elections in March. This summer, its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, called the Roma community in Nice "smelly" and "rash-inducing." In the Marais district of Paris, where young Roma gangs brazenly target tourists and locals at metros and bank machines, one pregnant girl says begging was her only lifeline. "It is very difficult to interpret their behaviour based on our own 20th-century standards," says Alain Behr, a defence lawyer who represented two of the accused clan chiefs. While not condoning the thievery, Behr says that what prosecutors had characterised as the practice of selling child brides was, in fact, part of a centuries-old tradition of Roma dowry. He noted that when investigators had descended on the ringleaders' hometown in Croatia, they discovered the family's imposing marble houses. "Someone in the Middle Ages would not be able to launder money amassed by children," he says. They may have grown up in Eastern Europe, but they perfectly understood Western values. She argues that assimilation into Western European culture does not require abandoning Roma traditions as much as overcoming age-old stereotypes and investing in education, jobs and healthcare. "The cultural explanation for Roma criminality is nonsense," she says. Nearly all Roma children there finish primary school, according to the Fundacio Secretariado Gitano, a Madrid-based foundation. Isidro Rodriguez, the foundation's director, cited access to free education, healthcare and social housing after the anti-Roma repression of the Franco years. Jaroka, who grew up in a poor community of Roma musicians in Tata, in Hungary, says she owed her success to her parents, a waiter and dressmaker, who insisted that she, her sister and her brother get an education in unsegregated schools. Today, her sister is a music therapist; her brother, a soccer coach. "We Roma," she says, "also need to learn to emancipate ourselves." New York Times; Telegraph, London; agencies