Overview of the week's top stories
since 17 March 2002

The European Union held a summit last weekend in Barcelona, in which delegations from the candidate countries were allowed to participate in plenary sessions for the first time. However, the summit’s focus was not on the expansion process, but on internal matters.

The most important agreement reached at the summit concerned the liberalization of the Union's energy market. Member states agreed to liberalize their commercial energy markets within the next two years, around the time the EU is expected to take on the first group of new members.

Leaders also reaffirmed their commitment to the so-called Lisbon strategy, through which they hope to push the EU's economy ahead of that of the United States by 2010. The strategy includes measures aimed at lowering unemployment, increasing the mobility of the workforce and making academic degrees and qualifications more comparable among the member states.

The summit was accompanied by major anti-globalization protests, and a Slovene was among those arrested. Though press reports varied, it seems the twenty year-old girl sustained a broken finger in the course of her arrest.

As of Tuesday, the national medical union Fides called a general strike of the country's doctors and dentists in order to stress the need for better working conditions. The strike is a so-called "soft" strike, meaning that doctors will only work a forty-hour week with the possibility of only ten hours of overtime. The strike does not intend to shut down the country's healthcare system, but many warn that in time, it could end up doing just that.

Among the doctors' demands are a forty-hour work week, less overtime, increased salary and more doctors. So far, the government has only agreed to allow greater enrollment in the medical training programs, and to facilitate the employment of foreign specialists. By some accounts, Slovenia lacks more than 300 specialized doctors, such as surgeons, emergency room doctors and transplant surgeons.

Fides is also concerned about the demographic situation among Slovenia's doctors. In the next five years, some 500 to 700 are expected to retire.

Throughout this week's strike, representatives of the government have been meeting with Fides to negotiate its conclusion. On Wednesday, Konrad Kuštrin, head of Fides, met with prime minister Janez Drnovšek, who agreed to seek out a solution that is financially possible for the state.

According to Kuštrin, the negotiations are going slowly, and it is impossible to guess when the strike will end. On Saturday, 23 March, Delo reported that the strike will continue into next week, and is not expected to end before Wednesday at the earliest.

Delo also reported on Saturday that Fides’s executive strike committee voted on Friday to abandon the negotiations. Kuštrin was quoted as saying "it is impossible to sign an agreement founded on a disagreement."

The Agreement on Cross-Border Traffic and Cooperation between Slovenia and Croatia (commonly referred to as SOPS) was implemented on Tuesday along the two countries' 670 kilometer border. SOPS includes provisions for farms, as well as quotas for fishing and hunting, along the border.

The major feature of the agreement, however, are special identification cards with which residents in settlements and villages up to ten kilometers within each country, on either side of the border, will be able to cross at 27 special border crossings without formality. The cards will not be valid at the other 25 international border crossings.

On the Slovene side, the first SOPS passes were ceremonially issued to Brežice mayor Vladislav Deržic and member of parliament Jože Avšic.

Young devoted special attention to the protection of intellectual property. According to Finance, the ambassador said that protection of intellectual property "attracts business, helps level the playing field for all businesses and promotes research and development."

Young spoke out in support of intellectual property rights earlier this year during a dispute between American pharmaceutical company Pfizer and two smaller Slovene competitors, Lek and Krka.

The Ministry of the Economy organized a conference to mark the publication of an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on investment policies in Slovenia and Slovenia’s accession to the OECD Declaration on International Investments and Multi-National Firms on Tuesday in Ljubljana.

Marie-France Houde, coordinator for states who are not OECD members participated in the conference. She told a Slovene daily that "Slovenia could attract more foreign direct investment if privatization were going more quickly."

Minister of the economy Tea Petrin told the conference that the level of foreign direct investment in 2001 was two times more than in 2000, some USD 450 million. Even so, Slovenia remains well below the levels of OECD member states and even most countries in transition.

Slovenia has signed an agreement on administrative cooperation with the OECD, and applied for full membership in 1996. However, the OECD is in the process of internal reorganization and is against admitting any new members until that has been completed.

The Linden Union announced its will support SLS leader Janez Podobnik in the upcoming presidential elections. However, the announcement was made without consulting Podobnik, who told Delo that he found out about it only through the media.

President of the Linden Union, Stanislav Klep, told Delo that they intentionally did not ask him, so that he could not say no. "The SLS has not yet found its candidate and so are proposing him," he said.

Zmago Jelinčič, Barbara Brezigar, and Tomaž Rozman are the only three who have announced their candidacies so far. Jelinčič will run under the banner of his Slovene Nationalist Party, while Brezigar has the support of the Social Democrats and New Slovenia and Rozman will run as an independent.

The parties will continue to operate independently, but say that they will form a united front when their combined efforts could be to the benefit of the country.

Though he has yet to announce his candidacy, current prime minister Janez Drnovšek is considered the most likely candidate to succeed the popular Milan Kučan.

• The Slovene-language version of Windows XP Professional hit stores on Friday. Given that almost 80,000 personal computers are sold each year, Microsoft Slovenija is expecting the package will sell well. According to Finance, of the 100 largest businesses in Slovenia, more than half license Windows programming and will soon be running Windows XP.

• Starting this week, Radio Center (103.7 MHz) began carrying Radio Marš programming on Thursdays. The Maribor independent station lost its frequency earlier this year after a long court battle.

• Organizers announced this week that the seventh annual Zlati Petelin music award ceremony most likely will not take place in April as usual. The problems Radio-Television Slovenija, a key partner of the annual award ceremony, has faced since the Eurosong 2002 scandals erupted last month seem to be the official reason.

• The Slovene Association of Journalists (DNS) protested this week against two rulings by a Croatian court against the Split news weekly Feral Tribune. The DNS believes the rulings were politically motivated and will lead to the legitimatization of censorship in Croatia. A DNS representative said that "the rulings, which are unacceptable in the contemporary democratic world, threaten the further publication of the magazine, which has received a number of international journalism awards and is the undisputed voice of democracy in Croatia."