In late October, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women issued a landmark ruling, declaring that Peru’s program of forced sterilization in the 1990s could be considered a crime against humanity and urging the country to compensate the victims. While the committee’s decision is nonbinding, it could prompt action in Peru to provide compensation to the victims, estimated to comprise more than 300,000 women, and catalyze more legal appeals by survivors of similar state-sponsored forced sterilization programs.
While the U.N.decision could well be a turning point for how the international community approaches instances of forced sterilization—defined as “the involuntary or coerced removal of a person’s ability to reproduce”—previous efforts to compensate and recognize survivors have faced daunting hurdles. Examining the trajectories of these other attempts to remedy the injustice of forced sterilization programs suggests that the U.N. committee’s decision will merely be the first step in a long and difficult process of securing justice for Peruvian victims of forced sterilization.
What Happened in Peru?
Peru’s program of forced sterilization began in 1996 under then-President Alberto Fujimori. Its roots lay in the government’s efforts to reduce poverty in the country—seen as a major policy concern and a contributing factor to anti-government sentiment fueling groups like the far-left Shining Path insurgency—through the country’s National Population Program. Over the course of four years, the program forcibly sterilized an estimated 25,000 men and 300,000 women, disproportionately targeting Indigenous, rural and impoverished women.