Prejudice is a part of our everyday life, and everybody upholds it to some extent. Often, they it is developed in our relationship with the foreign, the unknown, the “other”. In the public discourse, the migrants and refugees are widely perceived as being the opposite of our identity, they are the excluded » Others« that threaten us. The so called “migrant crisis” of 2015 and 2016 only amplified the negative, even hostile attitude towards the refugees and migrants. In Slovenia, the lack of acceptance and the exclusion of refugees were so severe that the state had trouble finding a suitable accommodation for the unaccompanied minors. How is this possible in the prosperous Europe that prides itself in its widely accepted democratic values? The European countries tried to establish the Common European Asylum System, which proved to be ineffective when large numbers of refugees started arriving. The system undertook some reforms, at least on the declarative level, but a wide gap between the adopted directives of the EU and the actual handling of the situation on the borders remains. In Postojna, the unaccompanied minors were housed in the SGLŠ school dormitory, where they were positively accepted by the local population. In my thesis I tried to determine to what extent, if at all, the residents of Postojna and its surroundings are prejudiced against the refugees. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the implementation and execution of the Common European Asylum System and to present an example of successful accommodation of unaccompanied underage migrants in Postojna.
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