A chilling report on a German researcher in Auschwitz.
A long article about the forced sterilisation of Romnja in Czechoslovakia (and beyond), and the long plight to get compensated.
The Czech President Petr Pavel has signed a law extending the deadline for submitting compensation claims for forced sterilisations to January 2027.
Many Romnja who had been forced-sterilised had tried to get their claims registered, but the process was so slow that they would have seen their claims dismissed. Let’s hope this time it will work.
The annual Amnesty International report on Czechia has just been published… It takes note of the incomplete compensation of the victims of forced sterilization among other things.
The František Kriegl Award of the Czech Charter 77 Foundation for Civic Courage was awarded this year to Romani activist and social worker Elena Gorolová. The jury honoured her for her personal and professional contribution to the fight for compensation for victims of illegal and secret sterilizations. It particularly highlighted her long-term efforts and the courage with which she raised the topic, as well as her subsequent fight for compensation for victims of illegal actions by state healthcare facilities.
It is estimated that thousands of women of Roma origin were sterilized in Czechoslovakia since the early 1970s. They had to wait decades for compensation.
In the Czechoslovak environment, forced sterilizations often took place in delivery rooms, at the moments of greatest vulnerability of women, during cesarean section births. Women in pain and under pressure from medical personnel were unable to give truly informed consent. The decree on sterilizations was repealed in 1993, but unfortunately isolated and illegal cases continued to occur. The last verified case of involuntary sterilization in the Czech Republic dates back only eleven years, to 2007. As Kateřina Čapková from the Institute of Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic emphasizes: “Forced sterilizations as a scientific topic seem to me to be important to study mainly in international contexts as a phenomenon that appears in states with different, and one could even say contradictory, ideologies.” The Prague Forum for Roma History therefore plans to support deeper research into this area that has so far been insufficiently researched.
Sixty-five-year-old Jarmila Adiová from Jirkov near Chomutov, who has applied for compensation for forced sterilisations tells about what happened to her. She said “First, social workers came to me and constantly checked how I was taking care of our five sons. They went to school and everything was fine. I was pregnant at the time and expecting a girl. The social workers threatened me that if I didn’t have an abortion, they would take my children away.”
The office in charge of granting compensation is working so slowly that the deadline for applciations will be missed by many if a new law proposal to extend it by two years is not voted soon.
Two articles in the French press about the forced sterilisations of Romnja in the Czech Republic.
Officially, forced sterilisations, which were common in Czechoslovakia, ceased. But apparently not really. This article states that 110 cases of forced sterilisations have been identified and were done after 1989.
Bad.
The Czech government has finally agreed to extend the deadline for submitting their claims for forced sterilisation by two years to January 2027. The deadline was originally set to January 2025, but the authorities raised so many hurdles for Romnja, that is was almost impossible to get these sterilisations acknowledged (even when there was some written evidence).
In the cases of illegally sterilized Roma women, beaten Roma during police raids and segregated Roma pupils, the courts finally recognized that their rights had been violated. However, this journey was not easy, it took a long time and in some cases it is not yet over.
These cases are also linked by the fact that the lawyer Vanda Durbáková from the Counselling Centre for Civil and Human Rights in Košice stood up for their rights. She has been representing the rights of Romae for over 20 years and also deals with public lawsuits, where they sue state institutions and point to systemic forms of discrimination and violation of the rights of Roma.
Another “Roma Vakeren” in Czechia. This time on Patrik Banga’s a Roma journalist book “on the way to America” snd on the Czech Television’s documentary cycle Me Som presenting Roma personalities, here Elena Gorolová, a fighter for compensation for involuntarily sterilized women.
Romnja, who were sterilized in the past in present day Slovakia, are demanding compensation. This initiative has been going on for more than twenty years and is still not fulfilled. It is possible that, like other problems, society in Slovakia will “avoid” this issue. Promises will remain at the verbal level, but we will not receive real compensation.
Czechia introduced a law to compensate women a while back, but are still dragging their feet in actually compensating the victims.
NGOs have called on the government to give victims of illegal sterilizations more time to claim compensation. According to them, the Ministry of Health does not process applications on time for a long time. The deadline now runs until the end of this year. And there are cases where the victims have been waiting for 554 days. The legal limit is 60 days …
This is bad faith on the Czech administration.
The Human Rights League (LLP), Roma organizations and activists called on the government to extend the law on compensation for illegal sterilizations. Organizations criticized the Ministry of Health for prolonging the application process. By law, the resort has 60 days to do so, but in practice it can take several months to years. The ombudsman repeatedly criticized the ministry’s approach to compensation.
Dozens of women demonstrated in Ostrava for compensation for forced sterilization.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) of the Slovak Republic wants to establish a working group that would prepare a legislative proposal for compensation for women sterilized in violation of the law. The Department informed about this in connection with the meeting of its State Secretary Katarína Roskoványi with the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Michael O’Flaherty.
It is about time. The practice continued even after the fall of the iron curtain.
A decision of the Supreme Administrative Court says that the Ministry of Health must now actively verify whether an applicant for compensation was subjected to illegal sterilization in the past.
The impetus for changing the system was the request of a woman whose request for compensation was rejected by the Ministry of Health in the spring of 2022. The decision was mainly justified by the fact that the applicant’s medical records had already been shredded and she herself had not proven the illegality of her sterilization.
The theater group Ara Art decided to help women who were victims of involuntary illegal sterilizations in the past. Their new project combines a theatrical production, an information campaign and personal support for compensation claims.
The law on the provision of a one-time financial sum to persons sterilized in violation of the law entered into force at the beginning of 2022. Since then, over 500 women, mainly of Roma origin, have received compensation. “Hundreds more have submitted applications that have not yet been approved, and many other women do not know how to deal with the administrative process or do not trust it,” said the Ara Art organization in a press release sent to the Romea.cz news site.
More than 500 Czech Romnja are still waiting for authorities to rule on their claims for compensation for having undergone forced sterilization over a period of decades, according to reports from Czech public television. A bill to compensate women who have been sterilized without legal consent in the past was approved by parliament in 2021, but the compensation process is complicated by the lack of medical documentation in many cases.
A court recently ruled that authorities should accept other types of evidence, such as testimonies, but progress on this has been slow. The department received over 1,100 applications, of which approximately 600 were processed and over 400 approved.
Time has passed since the legislation allowing people who were forced sterilised to ask for compensation. Well, so far, only 275 have received the money. This is almost deliberately slow.
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