8 Apr 2025 | Czech Republic, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Slovakia, Volume 54.01 Spring 2025
This article will appear in Volume 54, Issue 1 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled The forgotten patients: Lost voices in the global healthcare system, which will be published in April 2025.
Jana Husárová was in labour with her second child when the doctor presented her with a document. “I didn’t want to sign it,” she said. So she didn’t.
“When I got home, I visited my doctor in Sabinov. He told me that my [fallopian tubes] were tied.”
She went back to the hospital and asked how that could be possible when she had not signed a consent form.
It was 1984, and Husárová was 15 years old. She is one of many Roma women who have undergone forced sterilisation, as she described in a video for the Slovakian Centre for Civil and Human Rights (known as Poradňa).
Since then, she has fought for justice and compensation, and to stop this happening to other women.
In Soviet-era Czechoslovakia, Roma women underwent forced sterilisations, just as they had done under the Nazi regime.
They were offered money by visiting social workers, pressured into agreeing to the procedure and told that their other children would be taken away if they did not comply. Others were made to sign consent forms while in agony during childbirth, often with no idea what they were signing. When a caesarean section was performed, they were sterilised at the same time.
Then came the Velvet Revolution in 1989 – which marked the end of Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia – and, in 1993, the creation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia as sovereign nations.
Sterilisation was no longer state policy, but the doctors who had implemented it were never punished, and racism towards Roma communities continued to thrive.
And for Roma women, the practice was far from over.
In 2003, a grim reality was uncovered in a report by the global human rights organisation Centre for Reproductive Rights and Poradňa. The organisations interviewed about 110 Roma women across eastern Slovakia who had been (or had likely been) sterilised since the fall of communism. They found that doctors and nurses gave women “misleading or threatening information” to “coerce them into providing last-minute authorisations for sterilisations” when they were undergoing caesareans. C-sections were sometimes given unnecessarily, partly as a pretext for sterilisation.
In some cases, women were not told about the procedure until after the event – if ever.
Alongside forced sterilisation, Roma women faced physical and verbal abuse by medical providers. They were segregated in maternity wards and sent to Roma-only rooms. If they complained, they were insulted by doctors and nurses.
During the course of the research, hospital authorities stopped Roma women accessing their own medical records, denying them the opportunity to get to the truth. The government failed to condemn any of these practices or put an end to them. The report writers urged the government to examine the issues and make things right with the survivors.
In 2004, Slovakia adopted new legislation around informed consent, requiring women to wait 30 days before sterilisation could be performed. It also gave more protection to patients seeking access to their medical records.
Soon after the report was published, lawyer Vanda Durbáková started working with Poradňa on a plan to bring some of the cases to court while urging the government to introduce a compensation scheme.
At the time, Slovakia was scheduled to become a member of the European Union (EU), and all eyes were on the state of human rights in the country. The reaction to the report from the state was not welcoming, and it initiated criminal proceedings against the report’s authors.
But a group of Roma women felt empowered to take their stories to Parliament.
“They not only submitted their cases in the courts but were also really active, communicating with the media and starting as a group to fight for justice,” Durbáková said.
With little luck in the Slovakian courts, they took their cases to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg.
Between 2011 and 2013, the ECtHR made rulings in three cases, finding that Roma women who had been forcibly sterilised had had their rights violated. The women were granted financial compensation, and the Slovak courts began to make their own rulings in favour of other women, but it was a slow process.
“The women were not really encouraged to take their cases to the courts, because the [Roma] community was afraid of any victimisation,” Durbáková said, explaining that they were worried that suing hospitals would lead to further discrimination.
But the women who spoke up told her they believed their actions eventually led to them, and their daughters, getting better treatment.
Roma activist Veronika Cibriková, who was forcibly sterilised in 2000 during a caesarean section, told Poradňa: “I don’t want other women – and my daughter, who is now pregnant – to end up like I did. We fight for each and every woman so that they do not suffer as we have suffered.” She eventually got justice at the ECtHR.
Following a call for an inquiry by the UN Human Rights Committee, the Slovak government finally apologised in 2021. It promised to pass legislation to allow for financial compensation, but this has not yet come to fruition.
In 2017, CRR and Poradňa published another damning report, documenting Roma women’s experiences of reproductive healthcare in Slovakia. Women reported abuse, discrimination and physical restraint in childbirth. Almost all the women interviewed reported being segregated in maternity units – something the Commissioner for Human Rights condemned during a visit in February 2025.
One woman, Viola, said: “When I was giving birth…they were yelling at women during childbirth… They tied some women’s legs or jumped on their bellies. One woman [jumped on my belly] with all her weight, pressed it and yelled, ‘Push, push! You were fucking and so now you have to deliver’.”
Durbáková said that sometimes Roma-only rooms were so overcrowded that the women had to share beds. Poradňa is now litigating a case against one state-run hospital.
The fight for Roma women has roots that go back decades. The first documentation came in 1978 through the campaigning organisation Charter 77, with signatories including dissident writer (and, later, Czech president) Václav Havel.
It outlined how Roma women were not truly consenting to sterilisation, saying: “Czechoslovak institutions will soon have to answer charges that they are committing genocide.”
The Czech Republic is facing this ugly truth, too.
“During the 1990s, we began to hear stories of [Roma] women claiming that they were still being forcibly sterilised,” said Gwendolyn Albert, a human rights activist and journalist from the USA who now lives in the Czech Republic. Albert has campaigned for Roma women who have allegedly been sterilised as recently as 2017.
The woman she’s worked with the longest is Elena Gorolová, who became the face of the movement to seek justice in the Czech Republic.
Many Roma women felt ashamed that the decision to choose to have a family had been taken away from them, said Albert: “[These women] went to the hospital fully believing that the doctors had their best interests at heart and were going to do what was best for their health and what was best for their children. And instead, they’ve been tricked into becoming infertile, and so they feel stupid.”
Kumar Vishwanathan is the director of Life Together, an NGO working with Roma communities in Ostrava in the Czech Republic. When he found out that he knew many of the women impacted, he brought them together in his office. At first they were tentative to talk but they soon started opening up.
“They were suppressing it within themselves all their lives,” he said, adding that some women had faced physical abuse at home after it transpired they could no longer have children. “So that is a taboo which was broken around that table in 2003.”
In 2005, the Czech ombudsman published a report showing that there was significant reason to believe that forced sterilisations had continued until at least 2001.
Vishwanathan said that while there was a lot of support for the women during debates in Parliament’s Lower House, the problem came in the Upper House.
“A lot of them were doctors, former doctors, who felt threatened that if they agreed to the fact that these women were forcibly sterilised and have to be compensated… they will be challenged as people who violated the law,” he said.
The Czech government apologised in 2009, becoming the first in the region to do so. In 2021, Gorolová and others won the fight for women to receive compensation, although the government set a time limit for making a claim. Women had until the end of 2024 to apply, and they had to prove that they had been forcibly sterilised, even though many medical records had allegedly been destroyed or falsified.
The government is now debating a two-year extension of the process, and there are calls to remove the “burden of proof” from the victims and place it on the state instead. However, many women had already been rejected under the earlier rules, had not applied in the first place, or died before they had the chance to seek compensation.
There is likely more yet to be uncovered. Vishwanathan said that many Roma people have told him they still face segregation in Czech hospitals.
The issues in reproductive care for Roma women are not unique to the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Ana Rozanova from the ERGO Network, a group of pro-Roma NGOs across Europe, told Index that women in these two countries have simply been more vocal.
This is just a snapshot into the wider discrimination faced by Roma women across Europe, based on both ethnicity and gender.
It is the women who have put an end to forced sterilisation in the Czech Republic and Slovakia by fighting for justice – but there is further to go. The rest must now come to light and be eradicated.
3 Jun 2024 | Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News and features, Slovakia
You may have seen some of the coverage of the attack on Slovakia’s four-time and current Prime Minister Robert Fico. The attacker was apprehended and has not been formally named but is identified in Slovak media as a 71-year-old unsuccessful and disgruntled amateur writer who spread anti-Roma prejudices in his pamphlets. The blatant attack put Slovakia briefly in the global spotlight and came six years after Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were murdered, reportedly on the orders of oligarch Marián Kočner.
No country could sensibly have wanted this attention. Slovakia still meets the threshold for democracy in global comparative measurements. Yet the attack, coupled with recent governmental assaults on independent institutions including public broadcasters, makes Slovakia appear dysfunctional and inspired by neighbouring Hungary. That country is ruled by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in an increasingly authoritarian manner.
This sense of “something rotten” goes much deeper into the past than the 2024 assault, and the 2018 murder of Kuciak and Kušnírová was a critical juncture. Fico governed back then, too, for the third time, and his rule facilitated the impunity of Kočner and the like. While not known as a friend of independent institutions, Fico managed to persuade some democratic parties to form a coalition with him.
The 2018 murder sparked massive protests and Fico resigned – only to hand his seat to one of his deputies. That politician, Peter Pellegrini, is now Slovakia’s President-elect, to be inaugurated in June.
The 2020 elections were supposed to translate anger towards the previous political elite into a pro-reform government. A new government emerged, but led by an inexperienced populist, who was faced straight away by the immense challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A post-pandemic cabinet emboldened qualified investigators to unearth crimes of corruption. In fact, this is why Kočner is already in jail, as his orchestration of the Kuciak murder is still being litigated. The first-instance court acquitted Kočner twice for the murder-related charges, despite the first acquittal being quashed on appeal.
The “untying of hands” of the investigators made some Slovak elites, Fico among them, worried. Fico himself narrowly avoided investigative detention although one of his closest aides spent a month inside.
Hence, when frustration from the mismanagement of the pandemic combined with unscrupulous use of disinformation catapulted Fico to become PM for the fourth time, his government identified those same anti-corruption bodies as a key target. If democracy was to fall with them, why not?
With the police and special prosecution service gutted, the media has become the obvious next target. Fico has not hidden the fact that Kuciak’s journalistic successors, as well as intellectuals speaking truth to power, irritated him.
Some Slovak independent media have resisted this slide from democracy and a good deal of resistance remains, including from journalists themselves even in major commercial media which the government has had a hard time to subdue directly. Media owners are less enthusiastic about the risks of losing profit though, and signs of their willingness to compromise good relations with the government have been scarce so far.
There are other institutions that can help democracy, too. The Constitutional Court, an influential interpreter of the Slovak constitution, remains largely untouched by the government and difficult to be subordinated by the executive.
Slovakia’s constitution enshrined democracy at the front of its wording when it was enacted more than 30 years ago. That principle is still there, as are the rule of law and a relatively broad rights catalogue. As such, the Constitutional Court has much to work with to address, for example, challenges to legislation curbing independent public broadcasting.
These forms of resistance may even generate new leaders and ideas. Yet, there is little social energy left to go beyond just bearing up under the strain.
On New Year’s Eve 1990, weeks after the Velvet Revolution, dissident and last Czechoslovak President Václav Havel argued that “our country is not flourishing”. He meant to prepare the public for the difficulties of the transition from authoritarian state socialism.
These words apply equally for today’s Slovakia. The government is going to have a hard time to completely silence the opposition even with the additional support gained from the attack on Fico. The EU institutions may weigh in as well, especially if they learned some lessons from having observed the Hungarian regime change with minimal questioning.
But the energy to resist is taken from addressing long-term local and global issues – the climate emergency, demographic changes, a braindrain of Slovakian talent, underperformance in research and much more.
Arguably, Slovakia has lacked an elected government with a vision for more than a decade. NGOs, the media, or the public at large cannot replace vision-building completely. That leaves Slovak academia, where most Slovak political leaders were educated. Comparative disadvantages abound here: the oldest surviving university is just over a century old, and the country did not get an intellectual injection akin to, for example, the founding of the Central European University in Hungary. But these hurdles do not excuse its insufficient contribution towards a societal vision.
In Hungary, Orbán succeeded in effectively forcing most of the CEU out of Budapest and subordinating most public universities. In Slovakia, it is unclear whether the followers of Orbán would need to bother with academic resistance in the first place. And long-term democratic resistance is difficult to sustain without a positive societal vision.
Five years on from 2019, the individual who fired five bullets at Fico lamented that definitions and notions no longer apply. He should have stuck to his writing and talking. After this desperate act, a critical mass of Slovak journalists is trying their best to prevent even more definitions and notions being captured by non-democrats, an increasingly uphill struggle.
Alone, they will not succeed but others can help – both in daily vigilance to the government’s new measures, and by refocusing to a long-term vision for life in and of Slovakia beyond mere bearing up.
20 Feb 2019 | Campaigns -- Featured, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”98320″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]On behalf of the undersigned media freedom organisations, representing thousands of journalists and human rights activists across Europe, we urge the Slovak authorities to immediately start examining state responsibility in the failure to prevent the assassination of Ján Kuciak.
Tomorrow marks a full year since journalist Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were murdered in Slovakia. Kuciak was investigating cross-border corruption and links between powerful people and various mafia networks.
Since February 2018, we have closely monitored press and media freedom in Slovakia. We welcome the arrests of suspects who have now been charged in connection with Kuciak’s and Kušnírová’s murder.
However, a few months before he was killed, Kuciak reported threats against his person to the police. He published a post on his Facebook timeline on 20 October 2017 describing the absence of police actions after he had officially reported a threat by the businessman Marián Kočner. “It’s 44 days since I filed a threat … and the case probably doesn’t even have a particular cop [named in the case]”, his post reads.
When journalists report threats against them, the state is obliged to protect their life under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. We are concerned that to date there has been no adequate investigation of possible state breaches in its protective obligation.
We need answers to the following questions: (i) whether Slovakia knew, or ought to have known, of a present and immediate threat to his life; (ii) which steps, if any, have they taken to protect Kuciak from that threat; (iii) and what will be done to protect Slovak journalists in the future.
The killing of Kuciak and Kušnírová shocked the European public and has had a chilling effect on other journalists. In an environment of intimidation, threats, political interference and impunity, investigative journalists have to fear for their lives to fulfil their work and report on corruption and other threats to democracy. The value of independent journalism and free media should not be put into question. Anti-media rhetoric from those in high office is unacceptable, all the more so after the assassination of Ján Kuciak.
In addition, in January 2019 the Slovak ruling party proposed a bill, which would amend the Press Act to reintroduce a “right of reply”. If passed, this provision would contribute to an increasingly hostile environment for the free press by providing politicians who are the subject of critical news with the means to censor unwanted criticism. We call on the Slovak parliament to reject this bill. Moreover, the Government of the Slovak Republic must not undermine trust in public institutions, including the now to be newly composed Constitutional Court. It is its duty to uphold the rule of law.
We ask the Slovak authorities to carefully consider the resolution, approved by the LIBE Committee of the European Parliament on 19. February 2019, that includes a call on the Government of Slovakia to ensure the safety of journalists.
It is imperative that all relevant state authorities take effective and consistent action to counter the lack of safety for journalists across Europe. We seek justice for Ján Kuciak’s killing. We will keep pressuring until the perpetrators are found and duly convicted according to European standards.
Signed
European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
Article19
Association of European Journalists (AEJ)
European Federation of Journalists (EFJ)
Index on Censorship
Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa (OBCT)
Ossigeno per l’informazione
PEN International
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO)[/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1550595459123-d392e909-52fc-7″ taxonomies=”22979, 69, 7357, 6564″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
