Chamwe Kaira
3 July 2009
Windhoek — Around 50 HIV positive women plan to sue the Ministry of Health and Social Services for allegedly being sterilised against their will, their lawyer said.
Amon Ngavetene, a lawyer with the Legal Assistance Centre, told the Economist that the first six cases would be heard in the Namibian High Court in October this year.
"Summons have already been issued to the health ministry," he said.
Ngavetene said the women allege that they were sterilised at government hospitals in the country during labour.
"The women were told that they would not give birth at the hospitals if they were not sterilised. Others did sign documents but these are illiterate women who do not even understand English, the language the documents were written," Ngavetene said. "They did not have good knowledge on what was going on."
He did not say what kind of damages the women would to claim from the state.
"But as a human rights organisation, the Legal Assistance Centre is helping the women so that a legal president is established so that we don't a recurrence in the future," Ngavetene said.
Spokesperson of the health ministry, Gladys Kamboo said the ministry would not comment since the matter was in court.
"We can not comment since the matter is before the courts of law," she told the Economist.
In a related development, PLUSNEWS reported that the International Community for Women Living with HIV/AIDS (ICW) raised the alarm over what it terms forced or coerced sterilisations among HIV-positive women more than a year ago after hearing accounts of this through its regular forums for HIV-positive young women.
The organisation has since partnered the Legal Assistance Centre to bring two cases before a judge this year, according to the ICW's Aziza Ahmed.
Although the ICW has been made aware of a number of other cases, legal action has been hampered by difficulties in collecting evidence and statements from women involved, who are often reluctant to come forward due to fears that both their HIV status and their inability to bear children will be made public, according to Veronica Kalambi, who sits on the ICW's southern Africa steering committee.
Since the initial reports came to light, the ICW has conducted fact-finding missions to three of Namibia's 13 administrative regions to document stories from women who have been sterilised, some of whom said they signed consent forms to undergo what was simply listed on their health documents as a "BTL" without fully understanding its implications.
"BTL" is the acronym commonly used for bitubal ligations. Considered a permanent form of sterilisation, the procedure involves sealing a woman's fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancies. Reversals are possible but the procedure is costly and success is uncertain.
"The majority of these women are rural or illiterate, they don't know what 'BTL' means and there is no explanation. Even me, I didn't know what it meant," said Kalambi, adding that for some women, consent forms presented to them in English instead of their home languages were also a barrier to ensuring consent was actually informed.
The ICW's Saima Moses, who conducted research on the subject in northern Namibia, found some hospitals even had lists for women waiting to undergo the operation. Again, she said, few on the list had any idea what they were in for.
"It's a kind of discrimination," she said. "Nowadays, if you're HIV-positive, you can have a healthy child and it's your right [but] to doctors it's like because a woman is HIV-positive, why should they have a child? [Doctors] assume that child is always going to be sick."
According to Moses, a submission was made to the Deputy Minister of Health and Social Services to investigate cases of alleged 'forced sterilisation', however she has yet to respond.
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