IJCentral: International Justice Central

A new window has opened for justice and redress for victims of forced sterilization that were carried out under the administration of former President Alberto Fujimori, who served from 1990-2000 in Peru. A few weeks ago, Peru’s Attorney General José Antonio Peláez Bardales announced the reopening of these cases.

Thousands of women and men, most of them indigenous and poor, were victims of this terrible crime, perpetrated against their will and in terrible medical conditions. According to extra official reports, the Peruvian state sterilized around 300,000 women and more than 18,000 men as part of the state policy for reproductive health.

National Program for Reproductive Health and Family Planning

During the second term of Fujimori’s administration, between 1996 and 2000, voluntary contraception was one of the methods chosen within the administration’s plan for demographic control and public health.
However, the “consent” or “voluntary” part of the plan was not respected during the implementation of the program. Although officials in the Fujimori administration have stated that women and men signed consent forms prior to the practice, several NGOs have claimed that in some or most of the cases, people were forced, pressured, coerced or deceived into undergoing sterilization procedures, without prior consent. In certain instances the practice lead to death due to post-surgery complications; in others, it lead to health problems and psychological trauma, unemployment and isolation of victims from communities.

Likewise, the Ombudsman office said the national plan also breached principles of individual autonomy and the plan was deficient, infringing upon several human rights, including the rights to personal integrity, equality, freedom of conscience and religion, health, reproductive health, and ultimately life.

According to report by DEMUS, most of the victims were indigenous Andean peasants that speak Quechua, have low-levels of education, and are poor.

María Mamérita Mestanza Chávez Case and Access to Justice

Access to justice for cases of grave violations of reproductive rights (such as death and grave complications) has been deficient up to this point, as evidenced by the case of María Mamérita Mestanza Chávez (MMMC), who died in 1998 after having suffered from complications of a forced sterilization procedure. Her family brought the case to the local prosecutor’s office, but the case was archived in 1999. Despite this, her case was brought to the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) in 2001, where her family and Peruvian authorities signed a Friendly Solution Agreement, by which the Peruvian state admitted its international responsibility for the crime.

The agreement was finalized in 2003 and the state committed to: investigate and sanction the acts against personal freedom, life, body and health; adopt preventive measures to avoid the repetition of these acts in the future and amend the existing laws on reproductive health and family planning, removing any discriminatory language and respecting women’s rights; among other important commitments, including adopting redress measures.

Despite these efforts and the agreement, the Peruvian state did not implement the measures, and in May 2009, the Provincial Prosecutors of Human Rights (PPHR) announced the archiving of the case, stating that these crimes are neither genocide nor crimes against humanity.  The Criminal Superior Prosecutor’s Office confirmed the PPHR ruling and rejected the request made by victims against the decision of the Prosecutor to archive the file.

Access to justice and redress was blocked at the national level; therefore, the only way to reach justice was via the IACHR.

Crime against Humanity

On 21 October 2011, the Attorney’s General Office announced the state will reopen the investigation of these facts, and that it would comply with the agreement subscribed before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights. The investigations will be conducted by the Criminal Supra-Provincial Attorney’s office, which will have special jurisdiction in order to carry out investigations in all the Peruvian provinces.

For the first time, the cases of enforced sterilizations have been reclassified and will be prosecuted in Peru as crimes against humanity and not as common crimes.

International Criminal Law, specifically the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to which Peru is party, establishes such violations and other sexual abuses as crimes against humanity and war crimes. According to article 7.1 (g) of the Rome Statute, enforced sterilization, among other terrible crimes, could constitute crimes against humanity if commited as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population. These cases of enforced sterilization in Peru thereby meet the threshold for crimes against humanity.

Will Justice be done?

Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) did not examine these crimes, this recent acknowledgment by the state is very symbolic. Now, the Peruvian judiciary has the difficult task of putting an end for once to impunity for these crimes, assuring access to justice for all the victims and their families, and ordering reparations where appropriate.

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Mariana Rodríguez-Pareja is a Communications Expert and Human Rights Advocate. Twitter handle: @maritaerrepe

Julie Guillerot is Jurist from the Université de París X Nanterre and Universidad de Chile. Previously held positions include Aprodeh-Peru, Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), where she was the Program Manager in Morrocco (2009-2011).