Not long after independence, Slovenia without warning removed 25,671 people from the Register of permanent residents. Citizens of other SFRY republics in the case of the same residents of Slovenia were treated as newly created foreigners because they did not apply for admission for citizenship of the Republic of Slovenia within the six-month deadline, or their request was rejected for various reasons. Some of them did not even apply for Slovenian citizenship, as they were convinced that their status of permanent population would not change. Without any notice and options for appeal, they were deleted from the register, all of their documents were destroyed. With this, the state of Slovenia withdrew the Declaration of Good Intentions, which was given to the people before the referendum on autonomy and independence. The administrative staff pierced and destroyed their documents, and consequently they were deprived of their rights from employment, social, health and pension insurance. They did not destroy only the documents, but the lives of these people and their families.
The Slovenian Constitutional Court found twice that the erasure was carried out in incompatibility with the Constitution and ordered the legislator and the government to recognize the status of the erased people. Similarly, in the case of Kurić and Others vs. Slovenia, the European Court ruled in favor of the erased people in Slovenia as a serious violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms and ordered them to prepare a special mechanism for granting compensation to the erased people. The Slovene authorities have repeatedly amended the legislation to eliminate the consequences of the deletion, and finally adopted the Compensation of Damages Act to persons who were removed from the register of permanent residents, which was in effect until 18 June 2017.
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