The erased, court backlogs and the asylum policy are among the areas related to human rights that should be prioritised, according to Ombudsman Matjaz Hanzek, who spoke about Slovenia's human rights record on Monday.
The human rights situation in Slovenia is difficult to assess or compare to other countries, as each human rights ombudsman has different competences, Hanzek pointed out.
Most of the complaints filed with the Slovenian Ombudsman's Office at the beginning of its 10-year-old history were about violations related to denationalisation procedures and there have been frequent complaints from or regarding "the erased", people who were illegally taken out of the population registry by the authorities in 1992.
Hanzek said he hoped that the state would tackle the issue of the erased in due time, and stressed he was also unhappy about the excessively long legal procedures, especially when children are involved (e.g. custody of a child) and frequent cases of violation of social rights.
The ombudsman's office has had numerous complaints about the work of the police, he said. However, the police is actually the body that considers the ombudsman's recommendations and cooperates with his office the most, Hanzek pointed out.
According to the ombudsman, complaints on the part of marginalised social groups are decreasing, but Hanzek expressed some criticism about Slovenia's asylum policy.
"How are we to integrate asylum seekers, if we cannot even integrate our own citizens," Hanzek wondered, and added that the state had done very little about this issue, aside from building a new refuge.
Hanzek, furthermore, noted that intolerance seemed to be increasing in Slovenia, possibly meaning that this "phenomenon" was hidden for a long time until recently.
The Ombudsman's Office has set an exhibition about this very issue; the show will feature various expressions of intolerance from the time when Slovenia became independent in 1991 to the present day and will include statements of some of today's most important political figures.
Hanzek touched on the situation in Slovenia's prisons, and said the fact that prisoners had larger rooms was a good step forward, although the ventilation system is still very poor.
The ombudsman's lecture on the respect of human rights in Slovenia was organised by the Information and Documentation Centre on the Council of Europe at the Ljubljana Faculty of Law in light of Human Rights Day on 10 December.