Czech MPs to debate compensation bill for women as state refuses to acknowledge ‘attempted genocide’
Elena Gorolová was 21 when she gave birth to her second son. “The doctor told me I would need to deliver via a C-section otherwise I would be risking the health of me and the baby.” In the delivery room, a nurse gave her papers to sign. “I was in so much pain … I was in no state to think about what I was signing,” says the social workerfrom the Czech Republic. She had unknowingly signed an agreement to be sterilised. Until now, the Czech government has not officially acknowledged or compensated Roma women such as Gorolová for a government-led eugenics agenda from the early 1970s until it was officially abolished in 1993. No one knows how many women were affected. The European Roma Rights Centre says hundreds of women were systematically sterilised throughout the 1990s with the last-known case as recently as 2007. Now a discussion of a proposed law to allow victims of coercive sterilisation to apply for reparations is scheduled for the next parliamentary session on Wednesday. A draft bill from 2019 proposing a £10,200 payment to victims never reached the statute books. The Roma are the largest minority in the Czech Republic, with an estimated population of 250,000.
