On 22 July a longstanding wrong was righted in Czech courts. The Czech senate voted to compensate the thousands of Roma women that were sterilized forcibly or without their consent in Czechoslovakia from 1966 to 2012.
For Esma, who was forcibly sterilized in the early seventies, this move towards redress comes too late. ‘I don’t care for their money now and the ones who did it to us are probably dead,’ she says. ‘I am an old woman – I can barely walk up the stairs. I’ll have to give that money back to them when I pay for my funeral.’
