Czech government to extend compensation deadline for victims of forced sterilization
10 December 2024
As reported by Romea.cz, on 4 December, a bill was submitted to the Czech Parliament to extend the deadline by two years for compensation claims for illegal sterilization. The compensation law was originally set to expire at the end of this year. To date, the Health Ministry has received 2,088 requests for compensation, 1,522 of which have been processed. So far 706 requests have been granted while 566 are still being decided.
The proposed extension was welcomed by Czech Government Human Rights Commissioner Klára Šimáčková Laurenčíková and Commissioner for Roma Minority Affairs Lucie Fuková, who stated the extension of the law would give hope to women whose requests have been rejected or who are still waiting for a decision: “This especially makes sense for those women whom the state caused a great obstacle with regard to their compensation by shredding their medical records.”
Commissioner Šimáčková criticized the authorities’ handling of the issue, the long delays and the fact that many women have not received the compensation due them through no fault of their own. In a press release to Romea.cz, Commissioner Fuková stated
“The intention of the law to compensate unlawful sterilizations was to atone for the wrongs of the past and apologize for the injustices which have affected not just thousands of women, but also their families and loved ones … The entire process of the administrative proceedings has simply taken too long.”
In 2022, after many years of campaigning and advocacy by NGOs and the women themselves, a compensation law came into effect that awarded victims of coercive sterilisation a one-time payment of CZK 300,000 (€12,000) from the state. The health ministry anticipated 400 persons would apply for compensation, but as Deputy Health Minister Václav Pláteník said, “Exponentially more requests came to us than the lawmakers originally anticipated. We did not manage to process them due to the small number of staffers working on this.” He added that the ministry owes the women an apology for this.
In 2023, Dunja Mijatović, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, met with Romani victims of forced sterilisation and called for a quick resolution to all the ongoing problems many faced in accessing the compensation mechanism. These concerns included the mechanism’s almost exclusive reliance on medical records to assess the eligibility of applicants for compensation, and the difficulties in accessing such files when so many had been shredded, destroyed by flood or fire, or simply lost.
Another concern raised was that the burden of supplying medical evidence is disproportionately placed on the victims. She called on the authorities to speed up the process and to take measures to prevent the burden of proof being disproportionately put on victims, not least by “working on the presumption that claimants are indeed victims of unlawful sterilisation.” She reminded the authorities of the importance in tackling this historical injustice, and “to now get this right to ensure victims are not further humiliated and traumatised.”
On the 8 October 2024, Jana Řepová, a lawyer from the League of Human Rights, who has represented many of the victims, spoke of the negative impact of the ministry’s failure to process compensation requests within the timeframe established by the compensation law, and described the psychological toll on victims by such delays:
“Many women have had to appeal to the minister or sue in court over their rejected requests and the timeframes for resolving appeals or lawsuits are even lengthier. The client of ours who has been waiting the longest for a final decision has done so for 874 days … Unfortunately, some of our clients also passed away before they could be compensated. Such a fate may await another client of ours who is a cancer patient still waiting for the final decision.”
The practice of coercive sterilisation that targeted Romani women was legally sanctioned by a 1971 decree in communist Czechoslovakia which gave public authorities free rein to systematically sterilise women without full and informed consent as a means of birth control.
This was boosted in 1979 by a government program of financial incentives for Romani women, motivated by the need “to control the highly unhealthy Roma population through family planning and contraception.” The Sterilisation Directive was abolished in 1993, but the practice of sterilising Romani women without their consent continued throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, with the last known case occurring as recently as 2007.
Activists and signatories of Charter 77 voiced the first public criticism of this state policy. In a 1978 report entitled “The Situation of the Gypsies Roma in Czechoslovakia”, they claimed that the sterilisation of Romani women was a “planned administrative policy” and that “at internal meetings the success of social workers is assessed by the number of Romani women whom they have convinced to undergo the sterilisation.”
As documented by the ERRC, the sterilization procedure was often performed at the same time as caesarean sections or women were presented with consent forms when in great pain or distress during labour or delivery. However, there were also cases when Roma women underwent the procedure after threats to institutionalize their children or withdraw welfare benefits.
The long battle for redress
A report by the Czech Ombudsman published in 2005 concluded that the practice of involuntary sterilisation up to 1991 was directly and solely motivated by eugenics, and recommended that all women subjected to involuntary sterilisation between 1972 and 1991 should be eligible for compensation.
In 2009 and 2012, the Czech Government’s Human Rights Council passed resolutions recommending that the Czech Government introduce a mechanism for adequate financial redress for victims of involuntary sterilisation. In February 2015, the working group under the auspices of the Human Rights Ministry finalised a Compensation Act proposal.
In September 2015 the government rejected adopting this law without stating official reasons. In his reply to the concerns of the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights over the rejected bill, the Prime Minister Sobotka maintained that the state did not support practices of systemic sterilisation and had adopted all necessary measures to prevent any further incidents of involuntary sterilisation. Despite the legal evidence that the statute of limitation expired in all cases, Sobotka recommended all previously harmed women to seek justice through the Czech courts.
“The Czech state is 100% responsible, as they enabled licensing for doctors who sterilised women without their consent,” said human rights activist Gwendolyn Albert in an interview with the Guardian in 2021. “This attempted genocide of the Roma wasn’t a one-size-fits-all procedure,” she adds. Some women were promised them monetary rewards by their social workers, while others were told their children would be taken away if they did not comply. Sterilisation was part of a wider social narrative to “discriminate, seclude and eradicate” the Roma population. “The systematic racism within education, housing and the job market continues to affect the Romani population and there is little political will to implement change.”
Four years later, in a statement following the proposed extension of the deadline for compensation is Commissioner Roma Minority Affairs Lucie Fuková said “I very much welcome the initiative of Justice Minister Pavel Blažek and Eva Decroix”, that the bill had support from the opposition and Prime Minister Petr Fiala, and that “this initiative is a continuation of our collaboration to adopt a definition of antigypsyism this April.” It is to be hoped that 2025 will mark a turning point in the long battle for some form of redress, and at the very least the authorities will “now get this right to ensure victims are not further humiliated and traumatised.”
