Over 500 forcibly sterilized Roma women still waiting for compensation

Over 500 Czech Romany women are still waiting for the authorities to decide about their claim for compensation for having undergone forced sterilization under the communist regime, Czech Television reported. A bill on providing compensation for women who were forcibly or otherwise illegally sterilized in the years 1966 to 2012 was approved by Parliament in 2021, but the process of paying out compensation is complicated by a lack of medical documentation in many of these cases. A court recently ruled that the authorities should accept other kinds of proof, for example the testimony of witnesses, but progress on this has been slow. The ministry received over 1,100 applications of which around 600 have been processed, over four hundred in the affirmative.