‘Historic milestone' as court hears the horrors of Peru's forced sterilisation programme

Yahoo

29-05-2025

During the 1990s, Peru's government carried out a ruthless campaign of forced sterilisation, depriving hundreds of thousands of women of the right to bear children.
Now, for the first time, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has held a public hearing on the abuses – a case hailed as a 'historic milestone': Celia Ramos vs Peru.
Celia Ramos was, like most affected by the mass sterilisation scheme, a woman living in poverty. Houses in her village of La Legua, Piura, were made of canes and mud, had limited electricity and no sewage system. Yet despite the hardships, Ramos, a mother to three girls, was a woman 'full of life,' her eldest recalls.
Then, in July 1997, 34-year-old Ramos was sterilised – despite repeatedly refusing – as part of the National Reproductive Health and Family Planning Programme. Nineteen days later, after suffering respiratory arrest from medication used during the operation, she died.
'It was very abrupt – she was young and healthy and cheerful,' said daughter Marisela Monzón Ramos, who was 10 at the time.
'The entire family was shaken. My grandmother had to be sedated because the pain was too great. We felt the impact at every level.'
Ramos was one of at least 270,000 women sterilised under the national programme, launched and overseen by then-president Alberto Fujimori and his health ministers between 1996 and 2001. The Peruvian government has argued the sterilisation programme was part of a broader reproductive health policy, claiming it would decrease poverty, lower maternal and infant mortality rates, and curb fertility.
But estimates suggest fewer than one in ten of those sterilised gave consent, while most of those affected were poor and indigenous, and often illiterate or non-Spanish speaking.
Ramos' ordeal began with a visit to the local health centre for a routine check-up, where nurses encouraged her to undergo sterilisation – which she refused. According to family testimony, health workers then visited Ramos' home at least five times to 'harass' her into the procedure.
'They came insistently on several occasions,' said Monzón Ramos told the court on Thursday. 'I thought, why do they come so much looking for my mother? She didn't want to have the procedure.'
Carmen Cecilia Martínez, an associate director for legal strategies at the Centre for Reproductive Rights (CRR), which represents the family, said that health workers were 'under pressure to meet 'goals' that were imposed to execute the national policy'.
Lawyers say doctors were given compulsory sterilisation quotas and received financial incentives for performing the operations. 'The doctors obeyed a scale of orders that were controlled by the highest level of the country. We have evidence of the goals and quotas,' María Ysabel Cedano García, who also represents Ramos's daughters, told the Telegraph last year.
Testimonies reveal that thousands of women were harassed and threatened into undergoing the procedures, with many blackmailed, and others tied down, blindfolded and knocked out with horse tranquilliser.
Ramos underwent a tubal ligation on July 3. Her legal team – which also includes DEMUS (The Legal Study for the Defense of Women's Rights) and the Centre for Justice and International Law – insists she never gave consent.
'She was subjected to forced sterilisation,' said Martínez. 'The health centre was unfit for any medical procedure, the conditions were precarious, and she died.'
Peru's Ombudsman's office has linked 18 deaths to the scheme.
Last year, the Telegraph reported on the ongoing fight for justice. Florentina Loayza recalled how at the age of 19 she was sterilised under the pretence of receiving vaccinations. 'The doctor put a drip in my arm and I fell unconscious. That is when they mutilated me,' she said. 'Since then, I have been living in hell.'
In another case, 27-year-old Mavila Rios De Rengiro, went to a clinic believing she was having a smear test. 'They told me I was having a pap smear, and then they locked us in,' she said. 'I was afraid. The doctor didn't speak to me. I woke up in terrible pain and with a lot of blood.'
It took years for the scale of abuse in Peru to become public knowledge, partly because it unfolded against the backdrop of a brutal internal conflict that left nearly 70,000 dead. Many of Fujimori's supporters continue to deny that forced sterilisations ever took place.
The Ramos case was first brought before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2010. In 2021, the Commission declared the Peruvian State responsible for violating Ramos' rights and recommended reparations. However, Peru failed to act, and in 2023 the case was referred to the Inter-American Court.
'This is a historic opportunity to establish the responsibility of the Peruvian state – not only for multiple human rights violations committed against Celia Ramos but also for the thousands of affected women,' said Martínez.
In 2024, a landmark UN commission ruling concluded that Fujimori's policy amounted to sex-based violence and intersectional discrimination. It said that widespread and systematic forced sterilisation could constitute a 'crime against humanity' under the Rome Statute.
Yet the CRR said that the Peruvian State 'adopted a denialist position' during Thursday's hearing. 'It denied that forced sterilisations were systematically committed and questioned the existence of human rights violations affecting thousands of women,' it said.
Nancy Northup, the president of the CRR said that the 'decades of silence have only prolonged the cruelty'. 'Every survivor, and those like Celia Ramos who tragically did not survive, deserves her day in court.'
Ramos's legal team have requested the court declare the Peruvian state responsible for committing crimes against humanity and for violating multiple rights, including the right to life, personal integrity and health, reproductive autonomy and protection of Ramos and her family.
María Elena Carbajal, who was also a victim of the programme, said that the 'road to justice is long'. 'It's been over 28 years of uncommitted and unaccountable governments,' she said.
Monzón Ramos said she and her sisters hoped that 'after nearly three decades since our mother's death, the truth of what happened will be acknowledged'.
'That justice will be done, that a real and thorough investigation will be opened, and that the State will recognise and repair the harm we have suffered,' she said.
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