The purpose of the thesis is to analyse the problem of criminalization of protests in Slovenia from a sociological perspective, with an emphasis on the protests that took place in 2012 and 2013 in Slovenia and the repression that the then-government exercised over the protesters. I wonder if and in what way fundamental rights were violated, in particular the right to freedom of expression and the right to assembly. In doing so, I question whether violating them has increased control over citizens and whether our country is - by strengthening police presence - gradually becoming a police state. I am also interested in what parallels I can discover by comparing ‘all-Slovenian uprisings’ in 2012 and 2013 and the protests in the time of Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. In the empirical part of my thesis, I interviewed ten individuals who witnessed the repression in the case of protest in 2012/2013 and 2020/2021.
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