On September 17, hundreds of women gathered on a beach outside Lima, Peru to demand a ruling from the country's Constitutional Court (TC) on behalf of the more than 1,300 women who were sterilized during the administration of President Alberto Fujimori (1990- 2000). Dressed in the red and white colours of the national flag, the demonstrators, socially distanced as a measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19, embroidered their names on the Peruvian flag to show their anger at the systematic delays imposed by the Peruvian justice system in hearing their complaint. Many Andean women travelled over a thousand kilometers from the mountains to take part in the demonstration and to show that they would not give up their quest for justice.
As part of the government's family planning initiative, an estimated 244,344 women and 20,693 men were permanently sterilized, a move that has since been denounced internationally as a violations of human rights, especially of indigenous populations in rural areas, mainly the Quechuas and the Aymaras. The forced sterilizations were primarily funded by international agencies including USAID, the Nippon Foundation, and the United Nations Population Fund though the apparent focus was to reduce births in the most poverty-stricken parts of the country (as well as curbing anti-government forces, primarily the Shining Path guerrilla group). Despite active opposition from human rights groups, as well as the Catholic Church, the program also encouraged voluntary sterilization though public outreach campaigns.
Despite attempts to halt the complaint process due to the statute of limitations, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights later ruled that President Fujimori's sterilization program involved crimes against humanity, which are not time-limited. As a result, the Public Ministry presented the complaint filed by the relatives of the victims of forced sterilizations to the Judiciary in 2018. A year later, on December 9, 2019, the hearing of charges was convened for first time. But delays resulting from the appointment of a new prosecutor, as well as the current COVID-19 pandemic, has spurred calls for international action.
Five of the sterilization victims filed a complaint against the Peruvian government before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) at the end of September 2020. Along with a call for reparations, the complaint also calls for formal recognition of the barriers that the Peruvian government has placed for victims seeking justice and the often-traumatic process of testifying about what had been done to them years before. Mote importantly, they are looking for guarantees that this kind of injustice will not happen again.
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