Anna Šabatová: The Czech compensation process for illegally sterilized women, including Romani women, has raised many issues
In September 2004, the first 10 brave Romani women who said they had been sterilized against their will contacted then-ombudsman Otakar Motejl with the support of the civic association IQ Roma servis. They had decided to take the risk of fighting for their rights.
The ombudsman eventually received 87 such complaints. The result of more than a year of investigation was quite an extensive report which, in addition to analyzing the complaints in legal terms, put these sterilizations into historical and international context.
In that report, the ombudsman said that in none of the cases for which the medical records were available had the legal standard of the time been upheld with regard to the sterilizations, neither before November 1989 nor afterward. Unfortunately, he was unable to assess 30 complaints in which the medical records had not been preserved.
Eighteen years have passed since the ombudsman’s report was published. During that long time, the sterilized women strove for recognition of the fact that the state committed serious wrongdoing against them, as well as for financial compensation.
In 2009, the Government of Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer expressed regret for the women having been subjected to illegal sterilizations. It took another 12 years for Act No. 297/2021, Coll., on the provision of a one-time sum of money to illegally sterilized persons, to be adopted.
That law took effect in 2022. The Czech Health Ministry is now deciding each case.
The compensation process has become protracted, and from the start it has been marked by many insensitivities as well as illegalities. The Municipal Court in Prague has overturned at least three rejections, recommending that the ministry correct its administrative practice by giving the applicants better information about the process, by fully explaining its decisions, and by changing its administrative practice so that it conforms to the point of the law, which is to compensate these women for the suffering they have experienced.
The current ombudsman recently publicized through a press conference the results of his own recent investigation concentrating exactly on the performance of the state administration when compensating women who were illegally sterilized. He found that the ministry is handling the complaints slowly and communicating in an unfriendly way with the applicants.
The ministry is correcting some of these incorrect approaches now – despite the fact that in the cases where its decisions were overturned, it filed cassation complaints with the Supreme Administrative Court months ago. We can only hope its decision-making practice improves in terms of its quality.
However, what remains open is still a burning question which has yet to be decided by the first-instance courts as well as by the Supreme Administrative Court. That is the question of cases for which the original medical records no longer exist, as a consequence of which some women have difficulty proving their claims with regard to having been sterilized in the first place.
There are instances in which such records were destroyed during floods, and others in which hospitals illegally shredded them sooner than they should have. In my opinion, what is crucial is that this fact should not be a burden on the sterilized women, which for the time being, unfortunately, it still is.
The Czech Republic is not the only country coming to terms with illegally performed sterilizations. At the end of the last milliennium, Sweden had to remedy decades of practice that had been warped by eugenics in this regard.
The Swedish parliamentary commission that reviewed those forced sterilizations decided it was absolutely apparent that the evidence of the likelihood that the consent to those sterilizations had been given under a situation of duress would, after such a long time, have to be based predominantly on the experiences and testimonies of the persons at issue, not on any official records. Even in cases where a person’s testimony cannot be compared, for example, with a written record, the commission pleaded for the awarding of compensation if the testimony were found to be at least somewhat credible.
I am convinced that the Czech Republic should also draw inspiration from such considerations in the cases where medical records have not been preserved. That is the fair way to decide these cases with regard to the point of the law which was adopted to finally compensate the victims of illegal sterilizations after so many years.
