Ruling European Court of Human Rights on forced sterilisation

Monday, 05 December 2011 14:01

In a groundbreaking decision, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that forced sterilisation is a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. Several years ago, a Roma woman was forcibly sterilised in a state hospital in Eastern Slovakia during a Caesarean section.

While she was in the height of labour, hospital staff insisted that she sign a consent form for sterilisation, without informing her about what the procedure entailed. She was only told that a future pregnancy could kill her and was pressured to immediately undergo the procedure. The woman did not understand what she was agreeing to but fearing for her life, she signed the form. 

Complaint against Slovakia

After learning that the sterilisation was not medically necessary - and that the hospital staff violated her rights by not providing her with full information on the implications of the procedure, the woman filed a civil lawsuit in Slovakia - which was unsuccessfull. She then filed a complaint against Slovakia at the European Court of Human Rights in 2007.

This judgment in the case of VC (the Roma woman) vs Slovakia is a step forward for efforts to bring justice to the potentially thousands of Roma women who were sterilised without their consent in Central and Eastern Europe. Forced or coerced sterilisation is a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, an article which prohibits torture or inhuman and degrading treatment. It also violates the right to private and family life which is articulated in Article 8 of the convention. 

In its decision, the court noted that sterilisation is never a life-saving procedure and cannot be performed without the full and informed consent of the patient even if doctors believe that future pregnancy may pose a risk to the woman. The court also found that the hospital staff acted without respect for human dignity and human freedom by not giving the woman the time and information necessary to make a free and fully informed decision. 

The right to non-discrimination

In a blog on the Open Society blogspot, Christina Zampas of the Miami School of Law Human Rights Clinic wrote: "While the court alluded to the complicity of the state in grave human rights violations against Roma, it disappointingly did not address whether such conduct was a violation of the right to non-discrimination (Article 14). By not doing so, the judgment falls short of addressing the crux of the problem: that VC experienced these abuses because she is a Romani woman. The court rejected the government’s arguments in defense of its practice, which were based on negative stereotypes of Roma, but failed to call these arguments discriminatory." 

"Finding violations of Articles 3 and 8 alone in my opinion reduces this case to the individual level, whereas it is obvious that there was a general State policy of sterilisation of Roma women under the communist regime (governed by the 1972 Sterilisation Regulation), the effects of which continued to be felt up to the time of the facts giving rise to the present case…. The fact that there are other cases of this kind pending before the Court reinforces my personal conviction that the sterilisations performed on Roma women were not of an accidental nature, but relics of a long-standing attitude towards the Roma minority in Slovakia. To my mind, the applicant was “marked out” and observed as a patient who had to be sterilised just because of her origin, since it was obvious that there were no medically relevant reasons for sterilising her. In my view, that represents the strongest form of discrimination and should have led to a finding of a violation of Article 14 in connection with the violations found of Articles 3 and 8 of the Convention."

Christina Zampas is practitioner-in-residence at the Miami School of Law Human Rights Clinic. She previously directed the Europe programme at the Center for Reproductive Rights, where she co-authored the report Body and Soul: Forced Sterilization and Other Assaults on Roma Reproductive Freedom in Slovakia (2003).

Read the full blog