Nation-State Homogenization and the Battle for Legal Status: The Erased Residents of Slovenia
Nation-State Homogenization and the Battle for Legal Status: The Erased Residents of Slovenia

Summary/Abstract: Abstract. In a measure that later became known as the erasure (izbris), more than 25,000 people were deleted from Slovenia’s registry of permanent residents. These erased people (izbrisani) were natives of other Yugoslav republics who had been permanent residents of Slovenia before independence, but who did not acquire Slovenian citizenship afterwards. The erasure had serious consequences for those affected by it, and it is considered one of the gravest human rights violations to have occurred in Slovenia since 1991. The Constitutional Court of Slovenia found that the state administration had conducted the erasure without any legal basis. In fact, the vagueness of the so-called Aliens Act caused the court to deem this act unconstitutional. The legislature’s subsequent failure to act on this 2003 decision was condemned in 2010 by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in favour of the izbrisani in the case “Kurić and others vs. Slovenia”.

• Details
• Contents