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16 August 2006
Coercive Sterilization of Romani Women Examined at Hearing
New report focuses on Czech Republic and Slovakia
Washington -- Coercive sterilization of Romani women in the Czech Republic and Slovakia – predominantly in the communist era, but with the most recent case reported in 2004 -- was the subject of a U.S. commission hearing August 15, as well as of a new report released the same day by the commission’s staff.
The U.S. Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), also known as the Helsinki Commission, held the hearing with the aim of drawing attention to an issue that the post-communist world now is confronting but that a number of western European countries and the United States earlier also had to face.
Eugenics, a term coined by Frances Galton, a follower of Charles Darwin, was considered a valid science through the first half of the 20th century but since has been widely discredited. Its proponents, appealing to the science of the day for racist and social-class purposes, pushed governments to adopt policies and provide incentives to “improve” or “protect” human hereditary traits by intervening into human reproduction. Among other measures, some eugenicists urged forced sterilization of those they deemed genetically inferior.
Nazi racial policies were based in part on eugenics. While the Holocaust revealed the horror of coercive eugenics in its most extreme form, forced sterilization programs often continued well after World War II due to a combination of inertia, racism and a misguided sense of public health duty on the part of some medical practitioners, according to testimony at the hearing.
The CSCE report – “Accountability and Impunity: Investigations into Sterilization without Informed Consent in The Czech Republic and Slovakia” – contrasts the way the two Central European countries have dealt with one of the darkest legacies of the communist era.
The Czech public defender of rights investigated allegations of forced sterilization of Roma and found that it was a problem not only under the former communist regime prior to 1990 but also subsequently. Concluding that 100 percent of the alleged coercive sterilizations he investigated were illegal due to a lack of informed consent, the Czech public defender recommended in a report issued in December 2005 that the Czech government better anchor the principle of informed consent in its laws, ensure a change of culture in the Czech medical community with respect to the principle of informed consent and adopt a simplified procedure to compensate victims of its forced sterilization policy.
The Slovak government, on the other hand, resisted investigating cases of forced sterilizations and finally did so in a fashion the CSCE report criticizes as fundamentally flawed. The Slovak investigators were tasked with examining the narrow question of whether genocide had occurred and concluded it had not. Sterilizations not in compliance with Slovak law at the time were “dismissed as merely ‘procedural shortcomings,’” according to the CSCE, although the Slovak report did result in some positive changes in Slovak law.
Gwendolyn Albert, the director of the League of Human Rights in the Czech Republic (a private advocacy group), presented the commission with an overview of the history of coercive sterilization in the Czech Republic and a list of recommendations her group is urging the Czech government to implement.
In the Holocaust, 95 percent of the Czech Republic’s Romani minority was murdered. Today, Roma number 200,000–300,000 out of a total Czech population of about 10 million. The most recent coercive sterilization of which Albert’s group is aware took place in 2004.
In the communist period, doctors and social workers coerced Romani women into agreeing to sterilizations through financial incentives or threats to cut off welfare benefits or to take their children away, Albert said. In an unknown number of cases doctors also sterilized women who gave birth through Caesarean delivery.
The more recent cases “are primarily instances of doctors recommending Caesarian delivery of pregnant women and then exploiting that opportunity to sterilize them after delivery, or sterilizing them during abortions, surgery for ectopic pregnancies, or removal of intrauterine birth control,” she said.
While praising the Czech public defender’s December 2005 report as an “incredible advance,” Albert said ministerial members of the Czech Government Human Rights Council blocked a vote to adopt the report’s recommendations at a May 2006 session, “with the Health Ministry disavowing any state responsibility at all and even arguing speciously that the Czech Republic is not the successor state to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.”
Czechoslovakia’s communist regime was overthrown in 1989 in the so-called “Velvet Revolution.” The Czech Republic and Slovakia chose to become separate countries in 1993.
The Czech legal system has responded to charges of coercive sterilization by ordering a hospital to apologize to one victim and by dismissing five cases as not actually constituting violations of the law. Other cases are pending, while those whose cases were dismissed are considering a complaint to the Czech Constitutional Court, Albert said.
Her group is urging the Czech government to apologize to the victims and to adopt the recommendations of the Czech public defender including legislative changes and the establishment of a compensation mechanism for victims.
Claude Cahn of the European Roma Rights Centre, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in Slovakia, submitted written testimony on coercive sterilization of Romani women in Slovakia.
“Where Czech officials have to date been delinquent in righting these wrongs, Slovak officials have deliberately and maliciously sought to thwart justice,” Cahn charges.
Cahn also implied that, while coercive sterilization of Romani women was state policy in communist Czechoslovakia, the practice was continued after the fall of communism more through negligence than malignity. “After the fall of communism, Czechoslovak officials cancelled this policy, but not all doctors got the message,” he says.
Cahn also said Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland “all have histories of coercive sterilization of minorities and other groups.”
Thirty-three states in the United States, too, endorsed forced sterilization policies at one time, and in recent years a number of governors have offered public apologies to victims. From the mid-1940s through 1963, some 65,000 Americans were sterilized as a result of such policies, according to a study funded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Merck Co. Foundation.
Accountability and Impunity: Investigations Into Sterilization Without Informed Consent in the Czech Republic and Slovakia is available (PDF, 23 pages) on the CSCE Web site.
An unofficial transcript of the hearing is available on the CSCE Web site.
For more information on eugenics and the Holocaust, see the Web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
