Overview of the week's top stories
since 19 January 2002

Prime Minister Drnovšek – and many others – are among the most corrupt people in the country, according to Boris Šuštar. Last November, the former state secretary at the Ministry of the Economy was sentenced to three years in prison after being convicted for accepting a bribe. The sentence has not yet taken effect.

Helsinki Monitor believes Šuštar’s case was exploited to demonstrate to the EU that Slovenia is serious about tackling corruption.

At the press conference, Šuštar also reiterated the claim that he was a sacrificial lamb and further announced that he has filed a suit against prosecutor Gorazd Fišer and three others for 14 irregularities in the course of his arrest and trial.

The National Assembly is set to review a draft Law on the President of the Republic of Slovenia, but many are wondering why. The institution of the President has been around for a decade now with no special legal regulation, and since this year is an election year, the draft law is creating suspicion about the motives of its initiators.

The fact that the decision to prepare the law was made by parliament in its last mandate has done little to alay concern. Dnevnik wrote this week that the law’s appearance has raised the question of whether parliament is taking its last chance to limit the benefits of the exiting president.

Mayors of the northern Koroška region met this week to once again demand that their region get formal status in any regionalization scheme the government adopts. The EU is requiring the country to devise a regional tier of government, but so far Ljubljana has not formulated a final plan.

The Koroška region, centered on Slovenj Gradec, is home to some 75,000 people in twenty towns. Of all of the current statistical regions, its people have perhaps the strongest regional identity, thanks to the region’s historical role as cradle of the Slovene nation.

According to Janeza Komljanca, the mayor of Slovenj Gradec, "Koroška residents are not interested in how many regions Slovenia has, but we simply demand our own Koroška region."

The mayors also want their thus-far informal body to be formalized as the Council of the Koroška Region, which would be the regional government’s legislative branch. The Council was formed in 1997, and the following year, it promulgated the Declaration on the Establishment of the Koroška Region, which was sent to parliament. Parliament, however, has done little if anyting towards establishing regional governments thus far.

A draft law placing a whole list of restrictions on the consumption, sale and advertisement of alcohol is about to go before the National Assembly. Though Slovenia’s per capita alcohol consumption is among the highest in Europe, the country is only now forming clear policies on the issue.

The draft law was prepared by the Ministry of Health with the intention of lessening the use – and consequences – of alcohol. It has been sent to parliament and is awaiting review. According to Minister of Health Dr. Dušan Keber, "The law is not prohibition, but introduces a wide social responsibility for this topic."

The law will introduce a minium drinking age of 18. Further, stores will not be able to sell alcoholic beverages from 9:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. Bars will not have the evening restriction, but they will not be allowed to serve alcohol until after 10:00 a.m. Various sites will not be allowed to sell alcoholic beverages whatsoever, including educational and heath establishments, recreational centers and gas stations.

Supplementing the Law on Media, the draft law also introduces restrictions on advertising alcoholic beverages. The Law on Media, passed last year, forbade all alcohol advertising, but the draft law would allow at least beer and wine makers to advertise their products.

Even more pressing than the high rate of alcohol use in Slovenia is the high rate of suicide. Since the 1960s, Slovenia’s national average has been chronically high, roughly 30 per 100,000 inhabitants annually. This virtually matches the UK’s total mortality rate by murder, suicide, accidents and all other external factors combined.

Last week’s suicide of a 31-year old prisoner serving a ten-year sentence was this year’s first, and prompted an article in Dnevnik this week. The average suicide rate among inmates surpasses even the national average – itself almost the highest in the world.

In the years 1995 and 1996, four inmates killed themselves; in 1997 two; 1998 four; 1999 one and 2000 and 2001 each four. The number of prisoners has consistently risen, from 4,276 in 1995 to 6,825 in 2001. The number of suicides has not matched that rise, but the number of attempts certainly has. In 2000, 19 prisoners attempted suicide, and last year 37.

Dnevnik cited a Celje psychiatrist who coldly said that many prisoners’ suicide attempts are not sincere, but are merely plays for attention. He believes that those suicide attempts which are successful are often unintentional.

According to State Secretary of the Ministry of Labor, Family and Social Issues Alenka Kovšec, a parliament is finaly ready to pass a law on the registration of same-sex partnerships, which gay rights groups have demaded for a decade. The law is to follow the German example, and will only deal with partnerships, not with other issues such as marriage or adoption.

The announcement was made at a conference last week in Ljubljana, where representatives of homosexual young people from the 13 EU candidate states presented their countries’ laws and the conditions they meet in everyday life.

Joke Swiebel, a Dutch MP in the European Parliament and leader of the parliamentary commission on the rights of same-sex oriented persons, presented the initiative of the EP which demands the removal of discriminatory laws before any candidate country may beome a member state of the EU.

State Secretary Alenka Kovšec told the conference that circumstances in Slovenia are slowly but surely changing.

"The rights of the same-sex oriented in Slovenia are partially regulated by the Law on Working Conditions, which explicitly prohibits discrimination against employment on the grounds of sexual orientation." However, according to Tatjana Greif, representative of the lesbian group ŠKUC-LL, "Just because discrimination is illegal does not mean that everyone respects the law."

Kovšec believes that passage of the draft law on the registration of same-sex partnerships will improve conditions significantly for the country’s gay men and women.

"However," she said, "as the experience with the referendum on fertilization with biomedical assistance showed, it is necessary to make such changes slowly." That referendum was held last year, and shot down the possibility of allowing unmarried women access to artificial insemination.