The Regional Prosecutor's Office in Košice has once again closed the much discussed case of alleged forced sterilisation of Roma women dating back to 2003.
The prosecutor's office dismissed a complaint from the representative of Ingrid G., Renata H. and Magdaléna K. against the investigator’s decision to halt the proceedings, the SITA newswire wrote.
"The police and the prosecutor's office came to the conclusion that no criminal act had been committed, so the investigation was closed,” said Milan Filicko, spokesperson for the Prosecutor's Office. “The results of the investigation indicate that sterilisation was always carried out with the consent of the patient and always when life or health was endangered."
The investigation, which at one point raised accusations of attempted genocide, started in 2003 when 28 cases of forced sterilisation of Roma women allegedly took place at gynecology-obstetrics wards across the country.
The Health Ministry set up an investigation team, which discovered that all patients sterilised between 1999 and 2002 signed requests for the procedure that had been reviewed and approved by a relevant committee.
Nonetheless, the Constitutional Court ruled in January 2007 that the prosecution office in Košice had failed to justify their decision to close the case. SITA
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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