Miroslav Vodrážka, fighter against the communist regime, calls on Czech PM to extend the law to compensate forcibly sterilized women
Miroslav Vodrážka, a researcher with the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and a participant in the resistance to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, has called on Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala to extend the law compensating illegally sterilized women, which is set to expire this year. In his letter, Vodrážka points to the delays in the compensation process and to the deficiencies in the communications from the Health Ministry which are endangering the opportunity for some women to be awarded fair compensation. In doing so, he has joined the calls of the many nonprofit organizations involved with this issue and the calls of the Public Defender of Rights drawing attention to the lack of action by the ministry.
Vodrážka reminds the PM that the Government, under his leadership, pledged to complete the process of coming to terms with the past of the communist regime, and also reminds him that the forced sterilization of Romani women was labeled a human rights violation in 1978 by the Charter 77 dissident movement. He underscores the importance of the Government extending the law not just for political reasons, but also for moral ones, given the equality of the sexes and out of respect for the historical legacy of the women whose rights were systematically violated by both the communist regime and the Nazi regime before it in this part of the world.
News server Romea.cz is publishing the letter here in full translation.
Letter by Miroslav Vodrážka addressed to Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala
Dear Mr. Prime Minister,
On 8 October 2024 a press conference was held on Act No. 297/2021 Coll., “on the provision of a one-time sum to those persons sterilized in contravention of applicable law”, which discussed the current delays in compensating illegally sterilized women in the context of the expiration of the law this year. The press conference was held by the League of Human Rights in collaboration with the British Embassy. British Ambassador Matt Field called for a solution to be found to this dilemma because, among other reasons, several such afflicted women currently live in the United Kingdom. That same day, the League of Human Rights, along with Romani organizations and women’s rights activists, called on your Government to extend the compensation law. What led them to make such a move was the approach taken by the Health Ministry, which has not been communicating and has been failing to meet the deadlines established by law, as well as its delays in dealing with requests for compensation, which currently risk many of the women who have been harmed in this way never getting justice. In the past, the Public Defender of Rights (the ombudsman) has also turned to you with a request for your Government to intervene against the ministry’s inaction. The ombudsman has also pointed out that the Health Ministry, managed by Vlastimil Válek, is no longer communicating with his office, which is why sanctions were subsequently imposed upon the ministry.
Your Government, in its 2022 program declaration, pledged to complete Czech society’s coming to terms with the past of the communist regime, unlike the previous cabinet of Andrej Babiš. I remind you that in 1978, Charter 77 published its Document no. 23, in which it referred to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, warning that Romani women were being discriminated against and that their forced sterilizations, which were instituted by the communist regime, targeted this ethnic minority with the aim of preventing them from having children.
As a researcher who has long investigated the history of women during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, I would like to point out that after 1948, the rights of women were systematically violated, which involved not just cases of illegally sterilizing women, but also the decimation of organizations run by women and the murder and persecution of leading feminists who defended women. It is no accident that the Nazi totalitarian regime executed the leading women’s rights activist Františka Plamínková and that the subsequent communist totalitarian regime executed her successor, Milada Horáková. I am reminding you of these facts of history because you were elected in 2007 by the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic to be a member of the Board of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, i.e., an institution created on the basis of the state’s responsibility to come to terms with the consequences of these authoritarian and totalitarian regimes which ruled Czechoslovakia during the 20th century.
If the Government, under your leadership, decided as part of its program to complete Czech society’s coming to terms with the past of the communist regime, then it should finish that task, and not just for reasons of political principle and reliability, but also with a view to what is called parity democracy, a concept that was explained by the Deputy Secretary-General of the Council of Europe Peter Leuprecht already in the 1990s as a democracy that takes into account the fact that human beings actually exist as men and women, in contrast to the traditional concept of democracy, in which political subjects are grasped in a universalist way as inherently “sexless”, and in which democratic processes remain controlled by men.
As part of coming to terms with the communist past, Czech lawmakers recently adopted, for example, a law on those who participated in the resistance to communism, the timeframe of which has not been limited to a short three years, so currently the concept of parity democracy should also be paid attention to, especially in the case of the illegal sterilizations of women.
For all of the reasons mentioned above, I ask that the Government accept the proposal of the human rights organizations and the illegally sterilized women in the matter of extending Act No. 297/2021, Coll.
Miroslav Vodrážka (*1954) is a Czech philosopher, commentator and musician who was involved in fighting the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. He is a representative of the underground, i.e., the alternative culture scene that was persecuted by the communist regime. During the 1970s he was charged with felony rioting and sentenced to several years of protective supervision by the courts for reasons of allegedly “posing a danger to society”. In the 1980s he was a co-organizer of the seminars and conspiratorial meetings held in people’s homes by the spokespersons for Charter 77. After 1989 he edited the magazine VOKNO, the illegal publishing of which he had contributed to while in the underground since 1979. After the Velvet Revolution he started researching totalitarian regimes, especially in the field of their repression of women and their systematic violations of human rights. Today he works as a researcher at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.
