Coercive Sterilization of Romani Women |
Recent days have seen an outbreak of interest in the media in the Czech Republic about the theme of coercive sterilization of Romani women in the Czech Republic.
From the 1970s until 1990, the Czechoslovak government sterilized Romani women programmatically, as part of policies aimed at reducing the "high, unhealthy" birth rate of Romani women. This policy was decried by the Czechoslovak dissident initiative Charter 77, and documented extensively in the late 1980s by dissidents Zbynek Andrs and Ruben Pellar. Human Rights Watch addressed the issue in a comprehensive report published in 1992 on the situation of Roma in Czechoslovakia, concluding that the practice had ended in mid-1990. A number of cases of coercive sterilization taking place in 1990 or before then in the Czech part of the former Czechoslovakia have also been recently documented. Criminal complaints filed with Czech and Slovak prosecutors on behalf of sterilized Romani women in each republic were dismissed in 1992 and 1993. No Romani woman sterilized by Czechoslovak authorities has ever received justice or even public recognition of the injustices to which they were systematically subjected under Communism.
Coercive sterilization is a very serious form of human rights abuse. Coercive sterilization is a violation of the bodily integrity of the victim and can cause severe psychological and emotional harm. In addition, coercive sterilization restricts or nullifies the ability of a woman to bear children, and does so without her having been able to participate fully in a decision of such evident import, the consequences of which are irreversible.
In June 2004, the UN Committee Against Torture recommended to the Czech government that it "investigate claims of involuntary sterilization, using medical and personnel records, and urge the complainants, to the extent possible, to assist in substantiating the allegations".
Source:
ASTRA bulletin, available at www.astra.org.pl, and
The European Roma Rights Center (ERRC)
