President honours erased on Human Rights Day
President Nataša Pirc Musar urged the government to fully tackle the worst human rights violation in Slovenia’s history as she honoured the erased, the thousands of people descending from other parts of the former Yugoslavia who were removed from Slovenia’s register of permanent residents in 1992.
The erased have been forced to become human rights advocates, having to resort to all domestic and international mechanisms in the fight for the respect of human rights, the president said as she presented them with the award she introduced last year to acknowledge work for human rights.
Early July 2024 marked the passage of twenty years since the establishment of institutions specialized in prosecuting war crimes in Serbia. The second decade of war crimes prosecution was marked by the political relativization of responsibility—both political and criminal—for crimes committed during the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. The dissolution of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) following the completion of its mandate, and the state’s shift in focus towards negotiations for European Union (EU) membership, have further pushed the issue of punishing human rights violations from the 1990s to the margins.