Europe and Central Asia Summary of Amnesty International’s Concerns in the Region, January-June 2007 Forced sterilization of women (update to AI Index: POL 10/001/2006 – Slovakia) On 22 January, the Constitutional Court demanded the reopening of an inquiry into the forced sterilisation of three Romani women. In a landmark decision, the Constitutional Court asked the Košice regional court to compensate the three women who were subject to forced sterilisations between 1999 and 2002. The three women were also to be awarded damages of 50,000 Slovak koruna (approximately 1,420 euros). Until that point the national authorities had always refused to admit that any forced sterilisations took place in the country's hospitals, only recognizing that there were "procedural shortcomings" regarding the sterilisation of some patients. Discrimination and intolerance According to a survey released on 10 May by the League for Mental Health, a nongovernmental organization (NGO), Slovak schoolchildren are often intolerant of Roma, Hungarians, refugees and the homeless. The survey showed the psychologists’ opinion that children follow their parents with their signs of intolerance against those groups. On 8 June, the UN Committee of the Rights of the Child (CRC) made public its concluding observations on Slovakia's compliance with the Convention on Rights of the Child. The CRC expressed its concerns about discrimination and segregation experienced by minorities, Roma in particular, in the areas of education, health care and housing and also about the continuing incidents of excessive use of force by police officers. The CRC pointed out that Slovakia’s AntiDiscrimination Act does not provide protection from discrimination in the areas of social security, healthcare, education and provision of goods and services on the grounds of ethnicity, disability, religion or belief, and sexual orientation. The CRC was also concerned that parents do not want Amnesty International 111 their children to have any contact with Roma children from residential homes and that citizens have, in some cases, rejected by referendum the existence of a children’s home in a municipality, causing the relocation of the home. Forced Evictions On 23 January the NGOs Milan Simecka Foundation, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions and the European Roma Rights Centre released a report on what they described as a wave of forced evictions experienced by Roma in Slovakia. The report signalled a number of causes for the increased number of forced evictions which included: amendments to the Civil Code in 2001 which weakened the legal position of tenants in municipal housing by removing the requirement for a court order for an eviction and reduced the obligations on local authorities to provide alternative housing; reforms to the social assistance system in 2004, which included a fundamental revision of housing allowances and the rights of the unemployed, weakening the ability of indigent tenants, particularly Roma, to regularly pay their rent and utility costs; a historical long-term neglect of the problem of non-paying of rents and utilities and the resistance of local authorities to using mechanisms to assist Roma pay back debts; the practice of excessive billing of Roma tenants by utilities for services such as water and energy; and municipalities moving Roma from housing in central locations, and placing them in newly built but segregated and very low quality buildings on the outskirts of towns or allocating them poor housing bought in small towns. Attacks against minorities foreigners and Members of minorities and foreigners continued to be subjected to racist attacks, which the police sometimes appeared reluctant to adequately respond to. AI Index: EUR 01/010/2007