Slovenian parliament backs security crackdown; activists call out anti-Roma move

Brussels -Tensions are mounting against the Roma community in Slovenia, following recent incidents that have raised the temperature of the public debate. At midnight yesterday (17 November), MPs approved a controversial law granting police broad powers to monitor so-called high-risk areas, which critics denounce as discriminatory. 

The new regulation was tabled after the killing of Aleš Šutar on 25 October by a 21-year-old Roma man during an argument in a nightclub in Novo Mesto, in the south of the country. That incident triggered large street protests, the massive deployment of police forces in Romani neighborhoods, and the dismissal of two ministers from the cabinet of the liberal premier Robert Golob. 

The head of government promised to remedy the situation, emphasising that the new rules were not intended “against a particular ethnic group, but against crime.” The new regulation gives police forces the power to monitor neighborhoods designated as particularly dangerous for public safety with greater discretion. 

There, the police will be allowed to enter a property or a means of transport without a court warrant (but not to conduct a formal house search) if they assess it as being “strictly necessary” to seize potential firearms immediately. In cases of necessity, forcible entry will be permitted. For the same purposes, wider video-photographic and audio surveillance will be allowed. 

The delimitation of “risk areas” will be the responsibility of the local police chief or the national police director, based on “objective indicators.” Surveillance orders must be issued in writing, are valid for a maximum of three months, and must be presented within 24 hours to an investigating judge for confirmation or cancellation.

 According to some surveys, over 60 percent of Slovenian citizens support the government’s crackdown. Several observers regard the Šutar law, passed as part of an omnibus package that also included a crackdown on violent crime and a tightening of social welfare rules, as a wink from Golob to the nationalist electorate, which, according to polls, would prefer his populist predecessor, Janez Janša, to the current prime minister. 

After all, tonight’s vote showed a rather cross-party unity of purpose in the hemicycle. Two of the three parties in the governing coalition – Golob’s Movement for Freedom (GS) and the Social Democrats (SD) – defended the bill along with opposition forces such as New Slovenia (NSi) and the Democratic Party (DS). The third partner in the majority, the Left (Levica), walked out of the chamber. The other opposition forces criticised the executive not so much on the content of the rules, but rather on the slowness in responding to crime perpetrated by the Roma (sic) people and the lack of ambition of the new regulations. 

For human rights groups, this is a direct attack against the Slovenian Roma communities and an attempt to segregate them through legislation denounced as repressive and discriminatory. Just yesterday, Amnesty International had asked – in vain – the Parliament not to pass it. The text of the law could soon be challenged before the Constitutional Court, according to remarks made by some jurists. 

For Mensur Haliti, vice-president of the Roma Foundation for Europe, the Slovenian government has come out in the open. “This law transforms entire neighborhoods into security zones and their residents into security categories,” he said, complaining that the text “treats an entire minority as a security threat.” Addressing the European Commission (which just today organised an enlargement forum in Brussels, urging candidate countries to respect EU values), Haliti stressed that “a Union that allows fear to become internal politics cannot give lessons of democracy and rule of law to its neighbours.“