A group of 19 Dutch women this Friday accused an order of Catholic nuns of subjecting them to forced labor and being “trapped” in convents when they were young and in vulnerable situations.
This case affects some 15,000 teenagers who were in the care of the “Sisters of the Good Shepherd” in the Netherlands between 1951 and 1979 and is being investigated by a court in Haarlem, which will rule in April.
The women are currently aged between 62 and 91 and say they were placed under the order’s guardianship when they were “adolescents in dire straits”.
They were forced to work six days a week, often spending hours sewing to sell, as well as washing and ironing clothes.
“The Order of the Good Shepherd is responsible for the violation of one of the most fundamental human rights we know: the prohibition of forced or compulsory labour,” lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld denounced.
“On the face of it, the Good Shepherd was doing a service to society, the government and the girls by providing them with a home for what he called ‘fallen women’,” added the court lawyer. “In reality, he has arrested hundreds of women and forced them to work,” he stressed.
Six women testified in court on Friday, with one of them saying she was “turned into a robot, following all the nuns’ orders and working day in and day out without rest.”
As the lawyers wrote in court documents, the clients are just a portion of “thousands of young women in various countries who have been severely mistreated by the order, subjected to forced labor on an industrial scale.”
The Order of the Good Shepherd rejects the allegations, stating that the nuns’ method has been “taken out of the context of the times”. The lawyers, in turn, claim that the claims are already time-barred.
Source: DN
