The ruling coalition issued a statement on Wednesday condemning the human rights abuses over the years and apologizing to the victims, the state news agency TASR reported.
The number of sterilizations carried out is only estimated, but the practice has affected at least several thousand women, a Roma spokeswoman told the government on its official website.
Forced sterilization was carried out between 1966 and 1989 with the aim of limiting the number of children born in the Roma community.
The government acknowledged that even after the fall of the communist regime, Roma women were pressured in clinics between 1990 and 2004 in an attempt to persuade them to undergo sterilization after the birth of their children.
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For years, human rights organizations and the Council of Europe had called on Slovakia to acknowledge years of systematic human rights abuses against Roma and to pay compensation to victims.
The Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, welcomed Slovakia’s apology as an important first step. She wrote that a mechanism for paying compensation should be set up quickly.
