The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Slovenia did not effectively implement two Constitutional Court decisions concerning the rights of the country's so-called 'erased' residents. In its decision issued on Tuesday, the court found that "the Slovenian authorities had persistently refused to regulate the applicants’ situation in line with the Constitutional Court’s decisions. "In particular, they had failed to pass appropriate legislation and to issue permanent residence permits to individual applicants and had thus interfered with their rights to respect for their private and/or family life, especially where the applicants were stateless." In their application filed in 2006, the initial 11 applicants argued that they had been deprived the right to acquire citizenship or preserve their permanent residence status in 1991, and has suffered serious and negative consequences since that time.
The applicants, like thousands of others who faced similar situations, were mainly citizens of other former Yugoslav republics who were living as permanent residents in Slovenia at the time it declared its independence in 1991. The applicants either did not file for permanent resident status or citizenship within the deadline, or their requests were denied. As a result, their names were 'erased' from the Slovenian Register of Permanent Residents in 1992. While the court said that it would not determine remedial measures, it noted that Slovenia must adopt general and individual measures to remedy the violations, in particular by issuing retroactive residence permits. In its press release, the court noted that several thousand people are still believed to be in the category of the "erased".
Almost 26,000 people, mainly nationals of other Yugoslav republics, were deleted from Slovenia’s permanent residence registry in 1992. Many of the erased, including people who had lived in the country for years, either left Slovenia after their records were erased or were deported. Official data show that the erased include 14,775 men and 10,896 women, 5,360 of whom were children. According to the Slovenian Interior Ministry, about 7,300 of these people acquired Slovenian citizenship by January 2009, while around 3,600 received permanent residency status. There are no data on the status of more than 13,000 people affected by the erasure. The deletion of thousands of people from the country's permanent residence registery is considered one of the gravest human rights violations in independent Slovenia.
The Constitutional Court ruled the erasure illegal twice, once in 1999 and again in 2003, and said that that those affected should have their status of permanent resident reinstated retroactively from the day the records were deleted. A 2003 law which aimed to allow the retroactive reinstatement of status to the erased was rejected in a 2004 referendum called by the opposition. The Interior Ministry then started reinstating the status to the erased based directly on the Constitutional Court ruling and managed to issue some 4,000 decisions. In its ruling yesterday the court noted that in March 2010 the Slovenian parliament adopted amendments on the law on the "erased", which aimed to enable thousands of people whose records were deleted in 1992 to apply for permanent resident status. However, at the time the court considered this judgement, the amendments had not yet entered into force.
Balkan Insight
