In the past, we have already reported that the Slovenian judiciary is at the top of the European Union in terms of human rights violations. By 2021, the European Court of Justice had found violations of at least one key right in 342 judgments. The European Court of Human Rights only rules on human rights violations that it accepts for consideration. But what about the cases that the Slovenian Constitutional Court does not take up at all?
The data published some time ago by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) casts a distinctly bad light on the Slovenian judiciary. From independence until 2021, the ECHR has dealt with 373 cases from Slovenia. Violations of at least one human right have been found in 342 judgments. The proportion of judgments that violated human rights that were heard by the ECHR reached a staggering 91.69 percent.
Add to this the four additional judgments from 2022 and two from last year. In the two judgments heard by the ECHR in 2023, the Court found a violation of the right to a fair trial. In short, the Slovenian judiciary is, in the long run, at the very top of human rights violations in the European Union.
But how many actual human rights violations are there?
The question of how many cases of human rights violations do not even reach the ECHR is, of course, relevant. Here, the data are even more frightening. Dr Jernej Letnar Černič wrote on the IUS-INFO web portal in 2019 already about the so-called “Gordian knot” of the resolution of constitutional complaints. As he writes, in 2019, only 55 out of 1008 resolved constitutional complaints were accepted for substantive consideration.
In 44 constitutional complaints (out of 55), at least one violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms was also found. “In terms of all the remaining appeals, the Constitutional Court either did not accept them for consideration (537 appeals) or rejected them (427),” he wrote, adding that the proportion of constitutional appeals accepted for substantive consideration was only 5.5 per cent.
In 2021, several well-known Slovenian jurists proposed adopting three measures to restore confidence in the Constitutional Court. The first of the recommended measures was specifically related to the analysis of unexplained dismissal decisions. The other two measures concerned increasing the transparency of the judiciary and adopting internal rules to prevent real and apparent conflicts of interest.
Last year, the Constitutional Court received 1.780 constitutional complaints. According to the Annual Activity Report, this represents an increase of 1.5 percent on the previous year, when it received 1.754 complaints. This figure includes mass cases, otherwise, the number of complaints would have been lower, at “only” 806.
We have submitted questions about the matter to the Constitutional Court. We asked them to provide us with information on how many constitutional complaints have not been accepted for substantive consideration since 2019. We will publish the data when we receive it.
In short, human rights violations could be an even more widespread phenomenon in Slovenia if the Constitutional Court actually considered all constitutional complaints on their merits. Since it does not, and in fact only deals with a very small proportion of them, we do not have the exact figure, but we do have some very worrying indications.
Ž. K.
