Elena Gorolová reporting on unacceptable approach of the Czech Health Ministry to the compensation of illegally sterilized women at OSCE/ODIHR meeting in Warsaw
From 23-24 November 2022, Elena Gorolová is attending a consultation meeting of Romani and Sinti women about the current challenges facing Romani people in the countries of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The meeting is convened by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw.
Gorolová was invited from the Czech Republic as a spokesperson for an informal group of women who have been harmed by forced sterilizations to speak about the unacceptable approach of the Czech Health Ministry to executing the law to compensate unlawfully sterilized persons and is recommending review of the rejections issued so far by the ministry. The Czech Government’s Human Rights Commissioner, Klára Laurenčíková, has called the situation unacceptable and is calling on the ministry to take the full situations of all applicants into account and not to limit its analysis of these cases to the formalistic perspective they have been using to date.
Elena Gorolová is a Romani woman from Ostrava, Czech Republic. She was sterilized without her free and informed consent in 1990.
Since the year 2005, Gorolová has been a spokesperson for the informal Group of Women Harmed by Forced Sterilization, which spent 16 years seeking compensation from the Government of the Czech Republic for these violations of their human rights. For this work she was included as the only woman from the Czech Republic among the BBC’s 100 most inspiring women in the world in 2018, honored with an Alice G. Masaryk Human Rights Award by the Embassy of the United States of America in Prague in 2021, and honored with an Olga Havel Award in 2022.
