Slovenia erases past mistakes
A 2008 protest in support of the Izbrisani - "the erased"
Photo: Amnesty.si
Slovenia this week changed its law on residency rights, bringing an end to the long struggle by a group known as "the erased" - people originally from elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia who found themselves struck off all official records overnight when the country declared independence.
On 8 March Slovenia’s Interior Minister Katarina Kresal pushed amendments to the so-called "law of the erased" through parliament. These changes should see the rights of the remaining 25,000 “erased” citizens of Slovenia reinstated.
It is hoped this will finally end the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare faced by people who almost 20 years ago woke up one day to find that they no longer officially existed and consequently were no longer entitled to welfare, health care, education or any of the other benefits of Slovenian citizenship.
Their saga began after the country declared independence in 1991. The 200,000 non-Slovenes who previously had Yugoslavian citizenship were given the option to register as foreigners living permanently in Slovenia, or to take up Slovenian citizenship. As many as 170,000 people took up the first option in 1992, but a smaller group of around 25,000 people were left stateless and as such were erased from official records.
Many of the “erased” citizens lost their rights simply because they were not aware that they had to apply for citizenship. When they discovered later that they needed to apply, they could no longer prove they had lived in Slovenia prior to 1991 because all their records had been erased.
Last month a district court in eastern Slovenia awarded an “erased” citizen €17,000 in compensation after he was left unable to work because he had no permanent status in the country.
The amendments to the law have been welcomed by the local media. The Večer newspaper praised it for ending the “most serious breach of human rights in the history of independent Slovenia”. But the move has its critics, who worry this will open the floodgates for thousands of costly compensation claims by former "erased persons". Nationalists are also unhappy, as they feel those who failed to register were against Slovenia's independence and should not now be rewarded with Slovenian citizenship.
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