The Erased - Information and documents

Assistance to the erased persons in regulating their legal status and awareness raising of the public on the erasure and the status of remedying the violations.

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About the project

In 1992, 25.671 people who had legal rights to reside in Slovenia were unlawfully deprived of their legal status in Slovenia. The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia with its decisions no. U-I-284/94 of 1999 and no. U-I-246/02 of 2003 found the deprivation of their legal status unlawful, and the Aliens Act that the authorities invoked as a legal basis for this measure of erasure unconstitutional. The Court ordered the legislative to remedy the unconstitutionality in a time limit of six months. The decision of the Constitutional Court, however, remained unimplemented for seven years.

The goal of the project is to keep reminding the authorities about their constitutional and international obligations to respect the decisions of their highest court and to remedy the violations of human rights, raise awareness of the public about the gravity of the consequences of the erasure and assist the erased people in regulation of the their legal status and other status-related issues.

Activities

  1. Monitoring of the application of the amendments to the Act Regulating the Legal Status of Citizens of Other Republics of the Former SFRY in the Republic of Slovenia, and alert the authorities about the encountered shortcomings.
  2. Collection of data on circumstances of erasure and its consequences by conducting interviews with the erased people as well as writing and archiving their stories (by ensuring the protection of their personal data).
  3. Offering free legal aid to the erased people and representation in administrative and judicial proceedings.
  4. Raising awareness of the public, holding lectures and organizing public events on erasure, its consequences and its contextualization from the perspective of transition, migration, human rights law and constitutional law, nationalism, health, language position and emancipatory practices.

Members of the project team

  • Neža Kogovšek Šalamon
    defended her PhD dissertation at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Law in 2011 on constitutional, international and comparative legal aspects of the erasure from the registry of permanent residents. She worked for the Legal Information Centre of Non-governmental Organizations – PIC in Ljubljana, and for Human Rights Watch in New York. In 2005 she joined a research team at the Peace Institute where she continues her legal and advocacy work on the national and international level.
  • Aleksandar Todorović
    is one of the most prominent individuals who have been erased from the register of permanent residents. He was the first president and co-founder of the Association of the Erased People of Slovenia and Civil Initiative of Erased Activists.
  • Brankica Petković
    holds master’s degree in the field of sociology of culture. Her work at the Peace Institute is focused on monitoring, policy research, advocacy, training/education and publishing activities in the field of media accountability (professional standards), access of minority groups and citizens to the media (communication rights of citizens and minority groups), media content diversity and media ownership pluralism. She is author of number of articles and reports and co-author of books on the above mentioned topics.
  • Maja Ladić
    graduated in 2010 at the Faculty of social sciences (political science – international relations) in Ljubljana. Areas of research: human rights, protection of the minorities, ethnic discrimination, ethnic conflicts, social inclusion, gender equality, development and development cooperation. At the Peace Institute she is a coordinator of development projects in Rwanda. She is also involved with The Erased: Remedying Human Rights Violations and Consistency of Migration and Development Policy projects.
  • Jelka Zorn
    holds a PhD in sociology and is a senior lecturer of social work at the Faculty of social work, University of Ljubljana. She is a researcher in the fields of the erasure and migration.
  • Katarina Vučko
    is a Master’s student of international law at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Law. She worked at the Legal Information Centre of Non-governmental Organizations – PIC in Ljubljana as legal advisor in the field of human rights and asylum. In 2009 she joined the Peace Institute where she works on human rights and provides legal aid for the erased people of Slovenia.
  • Sara Pistotnik
    is post-graduate student at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. The field of her interest is migration; the most intensively she is researching the erasure.
  • Uršula Lipovec Čebron
    holds a PhD in anthropology and is employed at the Department for ethnology and cultural anthropology, Faculty of Arts, as an assistant since 2001. Fields of her research are medical anthropology or anthropology of health, anthropology of migrations, anthropological research among asylum seekers, refugees and other categories of migrants.

Partners

Donor

Open Society Foundations financially supported the project Erased People of Slovenia – A Challenge of a Young Nation-State which was implemented by the Peace Institute from 2007 to 2009 and the project The Erased: Remedying Violations of Human Rights (2010-2012) in the framework of which also this information-documentation portal was created.