Izbrisani

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (February 2008) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

The Izbrisani (English: The Erased) is the name used in the media, for a group of people in Slovenia that remained without a legal status after the declaration of the country's independence in 1991.

In 1991, immediately after the declaration of independence by Slovenia, the approximately 200,000 residents of Slovenia who had citizenship of other republics of former Yugoslavia (the "citizenship of the Republic" was a purely formal status, which many did not know existed since it did not include any legal consequences) were granted the possibility to obtain, through a simple application, the citizenship of the new independent state. For those who would have chosen not to avail themselves of this possibility, the law required to register as "foreign" (a term denoting legal permanent residents without citizenship). Approximately 170,000 individuals presented the application, obtaining citizenship before the national elections in 1992. Some thousands chose the second option. The majority of those who, contrary to legal provisions, did not register themselves as "foreigners" were removed from the registry of Permanent Residence in February 1992, losing all social, civil, and political rights. This action was of purely administrative nature (and thus excluded any possibility of appeal) and that without any legal basis, struck, according to unofficial estimates, around 18,000 people, including some who had actually left the country, while others were simply unaware of the existence of the law that required them to confirm their status through a new application.

In 1999, the Constitutional Court declared the act of "erasing" illegal and unconstitutional, and annulled its legal consequences. In the same year, the Slovenian Parliament promulgated a law that offered the "erased" the opportunity to regain the residence, but only to those who lived permanently in Slovenian territory. The Constitutional Court abrogated this law as another attempt in the same direction. In 2003, the Court declared unconstitutional the 1992 Law that required residents with Slovenian citizenship of other Yugoslav republics to explicitly ask to obtain the status of "alien", and ordered the return of the status of residents at all "erased" with retroactive function (regardless of whether they actually did not live in Slovenia after 1992). Many lawyers (among other things some former members of the Constitutional Court and several authors of the the Constitution) harshly criticized this decision, since it annulled a legal provision included in the country's constitutional laws and thus, according to them, beyond the Court's jurisdiction.

The decision was followed by a harsh and lasting controversy, in which the LDS-led government gradually accepted the decisions taken by the Constitutional Court, while the opposition (SDS, N.Si, SLS and SNS) continued to criticize it. In February 2004, the parliamentary majority passed a law in accordance with the decision of the Court (which provided for the retroactivity only for those who were already in possession of residence); two months later, however, this law (called "Technical Law on the erased") was annulled by a referendum (supported by the right center opposition). This referendum was strongly contested by some institutions of the European Union.

In 2007 the number of the "erased" is imprecise, the group is fragmented into different legal categories: some have regained residency and citizenship, some only residence, some were expelled, many of them are living in Slovenia illegally. According to some estimates there are still 6,000 people without legal status, while many of those who managed to get the right to permanent residency had to pay heavily the consequences of years of irregularities. The issue was brought before the European Commission, but said he does not have jurisdiction. Some of the deleted made a collective appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, claiming that "The cancellation is a European problem, because it violates fundamental human rights provided by the EU Convention."

In 2005 and 2007, the SDS-led government proposed the regulation of the status of the "erased" by a Constitutional law that would treat each case individually. On both occasions, this compromise was rejected by the centre-left opposition.