Breakthrough: Challenging Coercive Sterilisations of Romani Women in the Czech Republic
Breakthrough: Challenging Coercive Sterilisations of Romani Women in the Czech Republic

Summary/Abstract: The ERRC and partner organisations off-guard for what it is now clear has been among its most significant actions to date – the effort to challenge the coercive sterilisation of Romani women in the Czech Republic. That week saw publication of an article by the Czech Press Agency, the state wire service, stating that the ERRC alleged coercive sterilisations of Romani women were ongoing in the Czech Republic. That article began what would soon amount to an avalanche of domestic media attention to the issue, significantly moving the justice agenda along. From the 1970s until 1990, the Czechoslovak government sterilised 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. Helsinki Watch (now 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 sterilisations taking place in 1990 or before then in the Czech part of the former Czechoslovakia have also been recently documented by the ERRC. Criminal complaints filed with Czech and Slovak prosecutors on behalf of sterilised Romani women in each republic were dismissed in 1992 and 1993. No Romani woman sterilised by Czechoslovak authorities has ever received justice or even public recognition of the injustices to which they were systematically subjected under Communism [...]

• Details
• Contents