A District Court in Košice has ruled that the rights of a Roma woman were violated when she was sterilised at the Košice-based Louis Pasteur University Hospital in 1999 without her informed consent, according to the NGO Consultancy for Civic and Human Rights who represented her. The hospital is obliged to formally apologise and pay financial compensation totalling almost €17,000. The hospital has appealed against the verdict. The woman was sterilised in 1999 during the premature Caesarean section birth of her second child. According to the complaint she was informed that sterilisation was to be performed by the doctor only when in labour and during strong contractions, when she feared for the life of her as-of-yet unborn child. The next day she was told she had been sterilised without receiving any further information about the operation or its consequences. Later she found out that a written sterilisation application, dated from the day of the birth of the child, signed in her hand, was included in her medical records - as if it was she who initiated the procedure.
The woman turned to the courts in 2005, complaining that the sterilisation was performed without her informed consent and no adequate time was granted for considering such a serious interference with her reproductive rights. She pursued an apology and compensation of approximately €16,600. In the past, accusations that Roma women had been forcedly sterilised in Slovakia had reached the European Court of Human Rights. In November 2011, the Court issued the first judgement in such a case. It unanimously found that a Slovak woman of Roma ethnic origin had been victims of coerced sterilisation in violation of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) and Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights. A similar decision was issued in a second case a year later. A third plaintiff died before hearing her verdict.
