Slovenian government and non governmental organisations are preparing a number of events to mark Human Rights Day, observed worldwide on 10 December. Experts took the opportunity to highlight some of the issues that Slovenia has not yet managed to solve. Amnesty International Slovenia (AIS) will bring to the attention of the authorities some of the most burning issues and call on them to take measures as soon as possible, Blaz Kovac of AIS told STA.

Kovac underscored the issues of civilian surveillance over the police, the erased (people who were removed from Slovenia's permanent residence registry in 1992), the implementation of the option protocol to the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture into Slovenian legal order, and the recognition of torture as a specific criminal offence.

Human Rights Ombudsman Matjaz Hanzek told STA that the state of human rights in Slovenia was quite satisfactory. However, he highlighted the disregard for Constitutional Court ruling to reinstate the status of the erased and the failure to adopt a mental health act as requested by the court.

Meanwhile, Constitutional Court Judge Ciril Ribicic pointed to the acute issue of human rights of minorities, which surfaced recently when a Roma family was relocated after a stand-off with the locals.

Ribicic told STA that Slovenia always had high standards regarding the protection of minorities, however now it started to deteriorate with regard to certain issues.

Legal expert Ljubo Bavcon said the role of the ombudsman had changed in the last decade. He believes that Hanzek, whose term ends on 21 February, is a good ombudsman.

"If the former and the incumbent governments respected the ombudsman's warnings, Slovenia would not be pilloried by the world public today," Bavcon said.

Slovenian human rights activists will join the protests over the deaths of the former Russian spy Aleksander Litvinenko and journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Rallies will be staged on Sunday in front of Russian embassies in Ljubljana and around Europe.

The theme of this year's Human Rights Day is "Fighting Poverty, a Matter of Obligation not Charity", since poverty is a cause and a product of human rights violations, the UN website says.

Human Rights Day marks the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948.

The document, which has become "a universal standard for defending and promoting human rights", says that "all human beings are born with equal and inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms".