Human Rights Day: NGO press conference

The Peace Institute is a part of a coalition of NGOs that expressed concern about the absence of the political will to stop the negative trend in respect for human rights and to address the systematic human rights violations that were in the past years the subject of many international human rights bodies’ observations.

The focus of the press conference were the Concluding observations of the second periodic report of Slovenia on the implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, issued by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the week prior to the Human Rights Day. Among other observations, the Committee raised concern about the weak and insufficient system for protection of human rights, including numerous constraints for effective functioning of national human rights institutions.

The Committee pointed out to the negative effect of austerity measures on access to rights in the field of health care, education and adequate accommodation for certain groups. With the increasing poverty the Committee pointed out the insufficiencies of the social protection system and raised concern about the increasing levels of unemployment and violations of workers’ rights. The Committee called upon the state to address numerous long-running systemic human rights violations of Roma, LGBT persons and the erased persons of Slovenia.

Concerning the violations the coalition of 12 NGOs prepared a shadow report which was submitted to the Committee. The shadow report was an important source of information and enabled a clear view of the actual state of economic, social and cultural rights in Slovenia which was also reflected in the observations of the Committee.