Czech Republic may atone for sterilization

PRAGUE, Czech Republic, July 17 (UPI) -- A Czech government rights committee said it plans to compensate victims of forced sterilization, mostly Gypsy women, with payments of about $10,000.

The government council for human rights is to consider a compensation plan in September, the Czech Lidove Noviny daily reported Tuesday.

The committee for biomedicine and human rights has worked out the plan to compensate a number of Romany women and at least one man who were sterilized without consent in the Czech Republic from 1966-91, Prague Radio said.

Last August a Gypsy woman testified before a U.N. committee that Romanies were forcibly sterilized in the Czech Republic. The woman told the U.N. committee she believed the operations were carried out because the people belonged to the Gypsy minority.

A scandal about illegal sterilization erupted in 2004 when the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest published allegations that the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania were "solving problems" of the Gypsy minority through such violations of basic human rights.