Lower house approves bill to compensate forced sterilization of Romany women

The lower house of Parliament has approved a bill to compensate the victims of forced sterilization in Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic.

Hundreds, potentially even thousands of predominantly  Roma women were involuntarily sterilized in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s and it is believed that forced sterilizations continued in some places even after the fall of communism in 1989.

In a resolution adopted in 2009 the Czech government expressed regret over the practice.

The proposed compensation would be a one-time payment of 300,000 crowns for each woman forcibly sterilized between June 1966 and March 2012.

The bill still needs to be approved by the Senate and signed into law by the president.