In a letter addressed to the Slovak Parliament and published on 12 June, Dunja Mijatović, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, welcomes the forthcoming second reading of a proposed law aimed at establishing a financial compensation mechanism for people who have been illegally sterilised.
This is a “historic opportunity to finally address this long-standing injustice”, she writes, adding a number of observations aimed at improving the text.
These concern the amount of compensation (lower than that awarded by the European Court of Human Rights and the Slovak courts), the nature of the evidence (medical records are sometimes impossible to produce), the time limit for submitting claims, which should be extended, the importance of providing the mechanism with sufficient and competent human resources, the introduction of information campaigns, including in minority languages, given the high number of Roma victims, etc.
These sterilisation campaigns were launched by the Communist government of the former Czechoslovakia and mainly targeted Roma communities. They were officially abolished in 1990, but continued by some Slovakian doctors until 2003.
A similar bill was adopted by the Czech Senate in 2021.
It concerns Roma women forcibly sterilised between 1966 and 2012.
Link to the Commissioner’s letter: https://aeur.eu/f/7f3 (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)