Gender-based violence

On 5 March, the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACtHR) notified its long-awaited judgment in Celia Edith Ramos Durand v. Peru. The case concerns the forced sterilisation of Celia Edith Ramos Durand and stands for thousands of predominantly Indigenous women who were sterilised under coercive conditions in Peru in the late 1990s. It is only the second judgment in which the Court addressed forced sterilisation, following I.V. v. Bolivia. The judgment has been widely welcomed as an important step toward justice in a challenging domestic context. It also contains notable ‘firsts’, including the majority’s decision to analyse the facts under the right to health and their characterisation as reproductive violence. At the same time, it raises important concerns. Most notably, the Court declined to qualify the acts as torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and refrained from recognising the forced sterilisations as crimes against humanity – a qualification it has made in previous judgments in relation to other underlying acts.