What's New

Today, the Slovak Government adopted a resolution in which it apologized to Romani women for forced sterilizations and condemned the practice. Our NGO welcomes the Resolution but highlights that Slovakia must also compensate Romani women in order to meet the obligation under international human rights standards.

The European Commission published a report that provides a detailed insight into the implementation of anti-discrimination legislation, including the Anti-Discrimination Act in Slovakia in 2020. Our cooperating lawyer, Vanda Durbakova, also participated in the preparation of this report in cooperation with the European Network of Legal Experts on Gender Equality and Non-Discrimination.

In recent weeks we have met with Roma women activists at two more meetings. We have talked about our participation in the July session of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights on the issue of compensation for illegally sterilized Roma women and planned further follow-up activities in this regard. The activists were very pleased with the recent personal support for their efforts by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.

In mid-July, we met in Košice with a group of Roma women activists, with whom we have been pursuing justice for illegally sterilized Romani women for a long time.

At the meeting of the Human Rights and Ethnic Minorities Committee of the Slovak Parliament, we spoke together with Roma activists about the need to finally take measures to ensure justice for illegally sterilized Roma women.

State authorities in Slovakia are paying increased attention to the need to compensate illegally sterilized women. Our NGO, together with a group of illegally sterilized Roma women, has been promoting justice for injured women for almost 20 years and calls on state authorities to take systemic action in this area.

We organized a networking meeting of Roma activists who, with our support, previously defended or are currently still defending their rights. We are very pleased that several of them have expressed an interest to share their experience in enforcing their rights with the public in the future.

In June we organized another meeting of a group of Romani women activists in Prešov, who, with our support, have long pursued rights of Romani women in Slovakia. They currently focus particularly on enforcing the law, which would enable to compensate forcibly sterilized Romani women.

At today's hearing, the District Court Košice finally discontinued criminal proceedings also against the second Roma men from Moldava nad Bodvou, whom we successfully represented before the European Court of Human Rights.

These days, the lower house of the Czech parliament passed a bill on compensation for illegally sterilized persons. Based on it, a number of Roma women in the Czech Republic who had been harmed by this practice in the past could be financially compensated. It is alarming that the nothing of the sort is being planned yet in Slovakia, even though illegal sterilizations have also affected many Roma women in our country.