The highest human rights court in Latin America this Thursday condemned Peru for the death of its citizen Celia Ramos, who died at the age of 34 in 1997 after being sterilized “under duress.”
The historic ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) is the first on Peru’s forced sterilization program, which operated between 1996 and 2000 and targeted poor, rural and indigenous women.
The court considered the Peruvian State “internationally responsible” for the violation of Ramos’s rights to life, health, personal integrity, family, access to information and equality before the law.
The court determined that Ramos “was pressured by health personnel to undergo a tubal ligation” on July 3, 1997, in a makeshift facility that “did not have the equipment or medications necessary for an adequate risk assessment or to attend to emergencies.”
Ramos, a mother of three girls, suffered a “severe allergic reaction” during the operation and died 19 days later.
The Peruvian State was declared responsible for the “lack of due diligence and unjustified delay in the investigation of what happened” and for the impact that Ramos’ death had on her daughters, husband and mother. As a result, the State had “violated the rights to personal (and) family integrity, and the rights of children.”
The mass sterilization of hundreds of thousands of women in the 1990s is considered the most egregious violation of human rights in Peru under the late former president Alberto Fujimori.
Neither Fujimori nor his health ministers were ever prosecuted for the campaign which, according to the court, “resulted in more than 314,000 sterilizations of women and 24,000 of men, many of them under coercion and without valid consent, mainly affecting indigenous women and those living in poverty or extreme poverty.”
The ruling noted that Peru’s National Reproductive Health and Family Planning Program had established numerical targets for women of childbearing age.
Catalina Martínez Coral, associate director of the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, welcomed the ruling as a victory for human rights at a news conference in Lima on Friday attended by two of Ramos’ daughters.
“Yesterday history was made not only for the women of Peru but for the region and the world,” she stated. “The court recognizes, reiterates and reinforces that sexual and reproductive rights are human rights.”
Marisela Monzón Ramos, 39, the eldest of Ramos’ daughters, said at the conference: “We represent all those thousands of women who suffered so much for so many years.
“For us, with this phrase, we relive what we have carried for so many years. It is both difficult and comforting.
“Although we have obtained justice and recognition of the truth, it does not take away the injustice that Celia Ramos and other women lost their lives,” added Monzón Ramos, who was 10 years old when her mother died.
María Ysabel Cedano, a lawyer for Demus, a Peruvian women’s rights organization, who first presented the case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2010, said: “What happened to Celia Ramos is the story of thousands of victims.”
In 2021, an IACHR report declared that the Peruvian State was responsible for the violation of Ramos’s rights and recommended paying reparations and taking measures to avoid any repetition.
