By Gwendolyn Albert

On Aug. 17, the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women reviewed the Czech Republic's Third Periodic Report on how the state has implemented the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), an international treaty that is binding upon the Czech Republic with all the force of domestic law.

As the ombudsman reported in his final statement on this issue last December, the slow and inefficient delivery of justice to victims of coercive sterilization remains one of the most serious human rights deficiencies unaddressed by the Czech government. The overwhelming majority of the victims are Romany women.

The European Roma Rights Center, Gender Studies and the League of Human Rights co-authored a shadow report on the Third Periodic Report emphasizing the need for the Czech government to address the issue as soon as possible and send a clear message to the public regarding these wrongs and who bears responsibility for them.

Elena Gorolová of Ostrava, north Moravia, a survivor of this violation, testified to the United Nations on behalf of the group of women harmed by sterilization, and I also testified before the Helsinki Commission in Washington, D.C., on the issue.

Victims of this practice and their supporters and advocates demonstrated for justice in Ostrava Aug. 17. On the same day, in New York City, the Czech state's response continued as per usual: Not a single word was devoted to the issue in the officially published statement presented to CEDAW.

When asked by a committee member to describe the steps taken by the government on this issue, the state representative reported a very sad state of affairs. The conclusions of the ombudsman's final statement, widely considered by human rights groups to represent a fundamental advance for the region, are essentially not recognized by the Health Ministry, the primary government agency under review.

While the ombudsman found that all of the complaints he received were justified in that consent to sterilization had been either: a) completely missing or b) coerced and/or uninformed, the Health Ministry does not agree that the same facts amount to involuntary sterilization. The ministry has pursued a formulaic response, one that human rights advocates have heard echoed from other ministries about other systemic abuses in this country before, i.e. that the incidents are isolated excesses and that the state bears no responsibility for them.

At a session of the Czech government's Human Rights Council earlier this year, a Health Ministry representative went so far as to claim that the Czech Republic is not the legal successor state to Czechoslovakia, a clearly untenable position that shows the depth of the ministry's desire to avoid responsibility.

The CEDAW committee's concluding recommendations will be released in a matter of weeks. Should a new government be in place by then, it would be appropriate for it to immediately address this matter and make a clear statement as to whose version of reality it supports: the Health Ministry's or the ombudsman's.

The question that remains before the victims is whether the government will take responsibility and implement the ombudsman's recommendations — namely that the government apologize to the victims and compensate them — or whether they will be condemned to fighting for justice case by case through the courts.

Despite the positive signal initially sent by the district court in Ostrava last November, which found in the case of Ferenčíková vs. Vítkovice Hospital that the patient's rights had indeed been violated when she was sterilized without her informed consent, there is no guarantee that justice will ultimately be served through the courts. Both sides appealed the verdict, and litigation could continue for years.

In Slovakia, the government has taken a schizophrenic approach to this issue, something that human rights advocates hope the Czech government will do its best to avoid. On the one hand, Slovakia has modernized its laws on informed consent, but, on the other, it denies the reality of the abuses that led to those changes being implemented.

Laws are only as meaningful as their implementation in practice; without proper monitoring of their impact, they remain mere words on paper. At this juncture, there is no guarantee that the lessons of the coercive sterilization debacle have truly been learned by those who implement public health policy in the Czech Republic. After all, the most recent coerced sterilization complained of to the ombudsman took place just two years ago.

Since the days of Charter 77, human rights advocates have been calling for justice for the victims of this practice. Czech foreign policy in recent years has not hesitated to criticize human rights abuses in places such as Belarus and Cuba. Indeed, the country has been a leader in Europe as far as drawing attention to human rights abuses in regimes that remain under communist rule. It is an unfortunate fact that the Czech Republic's legitimacy to criticize other regimes is severely undermined by its own failure to address past violations committed on its own territory.

Human rights advocates and coercive sterilization victims call on the next government to address this issue as soon as possible. It took the Health Ministry a year to review the complaints submitted to the ombudsman — will we have to wait another year before the government publicly and clearly addresses the ombudsman's final statement?

Given that the first coercive sterilization of which we are aware was committed in 1958, it is long past time for this issue to finally be addressed.