“The more judges there are, the less justice there is in this country. Thousands of people feel this, they see in concrete cases what is happening to others, and once, it will be enough,” said the leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS), Janez Janša, before the start of Tuesday’s trial at the Celje court. He was greeted there by supporters even before the start of the hearing.
The hearing in the “Trenta” case started at 9.00 a.m. and ended after just over two hours, and at 2.00 p.m., the announced rally started, where people gathered to protest against the more than obvious political retrials, and to prevent a repeat of 2014, when Janša was also unconstitutionally convicted and imprisoned.
2:30 p.m. Janša: “We are here because the judges who were once appointed by the party, the one-party dictatorship, chose their own successors. There has been no reform, no cut. We are the only country where that has been the case. Now, they want to cement it. There is a proposed constitutional amendment currently being prepared whereby judges would now be appointed by secret ballot. They want the Judicial Council, on which the judges have a majority, to continue to appoint successors directly, and for the people, on whose behalf they are judging, to only be able to read about this in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Slovenia after the President of the State has already published the names of the select candidates.
It could be worse, but as I said before, we are at a point where this pyramid of injustice will simply collapse. Slovenia does not have an independent judiciary. It has a branch of government that is the backbone of the deep state, which is the main instrument for the transitional left, enabling it to be in power practically forever, even when it has no government, because it has other institutions. So, the laws do not apply to them. When they were smashing up Ljubljana, spreading the Covid-19 virus and illegally closing the ring road, they later got their misdemeanour fines reimbursed.
There are also individuals in the Slovenian judiciary who judge appropriately. They are always quickly recused in cases that are owned by the transitional left. They disqualify themselves, they run away, because they know that otherwise, they will meet the fate of Judge Radonjić, who dared to acquit a man for whose guilt he could find no evidence, even though he had been previously convicted by the media and declared guilty in advance by others in the system. He acquitted Novič, and now he himself is a victim. He is being sued for defamation in this same court, he has been thrown out of court, he is being harassed everywhere. Recently, another court case was brought against him. The thing here is that he is being used as an example or a threat to others: if you do not do as we say, what happened to your colleague Radonjić will happen to you, too.
I am raising funds for the fines imposed on me this year. It is a hefty sum. If more than what I need is collected, we will set up a fund to help Mr Radonjić. We will also help others, more than half of my colleagues from the previous government, they have proceedings going against them of one kind or another, …., and at the same time, in the space of two years, they have still not found out who stole the Prime Minister’s identity and opened a bank account in Romania. There is no time for that.
The gathering today is the beginning of a revolt against the injustice, and it will last as long as it takes! We may be imprisoned, fined 600 thousand euros, but we will not give up. We are here today, largely spontaneously gathered, those of us who will not be intimidated. There are far more such people in Slovenia than some in Slovenia would like. We will fight with the means allowed by the Slovenian Constitution. We will not close the ring roads; we will not threaten individuals…. But we will be loud, we will be determined, there will be more and more of us, and we will never give up! All those for whom an independent Slovenia has never been the preferred option have retained many of the levers of power from the previous regime, but we have never forgotten our dream of the Slovenia we had in front of us when we went to the independence referendum and then became independent, and we will make it a reality. Slovenia can be a homeland for all, a homeland of equal rules for all, equal rights for all. What we need today is a relaxed Slovenia. It is a Slovenia free from the terror of the remnants and privileges of totalitarian regimes. It is a Slovenia of equal opportunities for the young and the old. A Slovenia of coexistence for all generations. It is a Slovenia where no new taxes are imposed on pensioners, while at the same time, privileges are being enacted for their elite. We will stop that, too. If necessary, with a referendum.”
2:23 p.m. Janša: “Ten years ago, I was in prison. I met poor people there who were there unjustly, but they did not have the money to go to the European Court, and they suffered there for years, and today, they are living bitterly in a country that some of them fought for three decades ago. We did not build this country, we did not fight for it, we did not vote for it to be the way it is now. That is why we will change it.
Slovenians are many things, including very patient. We suffered for decades in the former country, creating wealth that flowed down the Sava river. We suffered ridicule, humiliation on the western borders when we went to get coffee, which was not available here because of the flourishing socialism. But at some point, it was enough. Even the fourth most powerful army in Europe at that time did not stop us, and neither will the Slovenian criminal justice system.
If you could have watched one single hearing in the Patria trial live on TV, that trial would have fallen the next day. If you could watch a single trial in this case live, you would hear the judge making a mockery of the law, and it would be over tomorrow. But you are not allowed to watch that. This is a trial on behalf of the people. For the people’s sake, the trial has been moved to the smallest courtroom. The prosecutor who has wasted weeks of time here is also the prosecutor in the Litijska case. A year ago, 8 million euros of your money was wasted on a dilapidated building that the relevant Minister did not even go see in person before purchasing it. I am now on trial for selling an estate for which I gave 45 thousand marks in 1992, and which I sold for just over 120,000 euros – thirteen years later, when all the prices had gone up several times. The company that bought it from me bought a lot of things. And now, the director of that company, who had practically nothing to do with the purchase, is on trial. The latter has been experiencing abuse for the last 11 years, during which time he has had two heart attacks, and nobody cares. They are making a mockery of what is written in the Constitution and the laws, and that is why it needs to be changed.”
2:18 p.m. Janša: “A few days ago, the President of the Slovenian Association of Judges, Vesna Bergant Rakočević, spoke up, and in June 2014, when we were convicted at first instance in the Patria case, she publicly congratulated the judge who had been chosen to convict us. She congratulated her for her courage. Today, anyone who reads the judgment of the Constitutional Court can clearly see what a legal shambles the Patria trial was. But this judge did not apologise for that congratulatory message, even though she is a lawyer who respects the courts – well, obviously not the Constitutional Court, but she has been promoted to become the President of all the judges in Slovenia. The prosecutor who brought the indictment in the Trenta case then became President of the Slovenian Prosecutors’ Association. This is how progress is made in Slovenian justice. Janša is being prosecuted, and progress is being made. The harder you work to wrongfully convict him, the more you progress.
(The people started shouting: “Mafia!”) If you call the Slovenian criminal justice system a mafia, you are insulting the mafia! It is worse than that, because the mafia presents itself as the mafia. But here, the criminal justice system presents itself as justice. As someone over whom there is only a blue sky, and against whom you are not allowed to say anything, otherwise you are punished one way or another. If you say anything critical, they say you have no respect for the institution. This institution is at the very top of the European Union in terms of the number of judges. I think there is only one country that has more judges, especially female judges, per capita than Slovenia. At the same time, we have the highest number of judgments overturned for human rights violations at the European Court of Human Rights. That is to say, the more judges, the more injustices. This is the system that is the main obstacle to the fact that Slovenia has still not become what we voted for in the independence referendum a good three decades ago. As long as we are not able to carry out reforms here, there will be no democracy in Slovenia, nor will there be a better future, nor will there be the rule of law, nor will there be equal rights for all. This protest is not just about me, it is about all the thousands, tens of thousands, who have suffered injustice in the Slovenian courts.”
2:14 p.m. Janša: “Behind that door, a judge who was not the next on the list and jurors who were not next in line to be jurors, but who made sure they were on the jury, have been questioning dozens of witnesses since June, asking them who they met nineteen years ago. At the same time, there is a juror sitting in the Trial Chamber who has no recollection of having stood as a candidate for the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia party (LDS) a few years ago, or somewhere around that time. The head of the legal department of the municipality of Velenje, who was put there by the current Minister of Justice, Andreja Katič, is on the panel. She is, of course, the most independent person here. None of them should be in this Chamber, but they were put in anyway. And this is simply because of one sentence that you could read a few days ago, when someone was explaining what the late Danilo Slivnik had said to him. When the latter, at the time when the second Patria trial was being set up, met the then-husband of the then-Minister of the Interior, Mr Senica, he said to him at the time: ‘Now, we have finally found a judge who will convict Janša.’
Here, too, they have set up a panel that will convict us. The judgment was, in fact, written before this even came to court. There should have been no criminal charges, there should have been no indictment, there should have been no trial. When, somewhere, in some court, this judgment collapses, just as Patria collapsed, it will all seem normal. But by then, we will have gone to one or two elections first, and this judgment will be time-barred, as other things are, from reaching the European Court. Because if it had collapsed there, it would have been much more impactful.
2:12 p.m. The SDS party leader Janez Janša pointed out that elections are coming up again. “In Slovenia, the left has never won an election fairly. They have always cheated in one way or another.” Most often, he said, by abusing the so-called rule of law, by abusing the courts. “Behind these doors, in probably the smallest courtroom that exists in this court, a new political process is taking place. Not only me, but three people are being tried here. Can anyone name the other two people?” Janša asked those gathered before the Celje court. As he said, he is not even the first defendant here. Branko Kastelic is the first, and Klemen Gantar is the second. “We actually only met here. Even the journalists don’t know the other two who are accused.” Both of them, he said, are collateral damage who must be convicted so that he can be convicted, too.
2:07 p.m. MP Zvone Černač said that it was nice to see so many people gathered in front of the Celje court. The first show trial, he said, took place in an undemocratic country, the second in 2014, just before the national elections. “Are we going to allow the third rigged political process to end again before a democratic decision-making process? Does anyone still believe that the verdict has not already been written?!” As he said, nobody believes the latter anymore, probably because naivety is gone after so many years. “It is time to right wrongs and bring the real criminals to justice!”
The prosecutor who, according to MP Černač, is leading this rigged trial is wasting his time in this court week after week. The latter, he says, has not even taken the first step in the 6.7-million-euro deal of the controversial purchase of what was supposed to be the new court building on Litijska Street in Ljubljana. “Enough with the injustice, the people deserve fair judges and prosecutors!” As he said, there are more and more people who perceive injustice. These are people of different colours, not just SDS party members. However, he said, the party is experiencing an upward trend in the number of its members. “Freedom to Janez Janša! Freedom for all those who are unjustly persecuted, condemned and imprisoned!”
2:05 p.m. The President of the youth wing of the SDS party, the Slovenian Democratic Youth (Slovenska demokratska mladina – SDM), Luka Simonič, pointed out that we have a strange country that has a Director-General of police who was illegally appointed. And we once again have the champion of the opposition in court. “It is time for a new Slovenian spring,” he stressed, adding that it is time for new forces to take power and make a better Slovenia.
2:00 p.m. “Janša, Janša,” a large crowd chanted before the start of the rally in front of the Celje courthouse, which began with the singing of the Slovenian anthem. Mojca Škrinjar, former SDS MP and Ljubljana City Councillor, was the first to greet the gathered, friends of justice and truth, and she did not forget her own generation, who stood at Roška and won us this country.
“Now, people often don’t see the billions that are being wasted by government policies like the ones we have today and in some other mandates. But when things pile up, it is, of course, clear even to the average citizens what is happening,” said Janez Janša in front of the Celje court, explaining that Slovenia is “at the very top of Europe in terms of the number of judges per capita, and at the same time we are at the very top of Europe in terms of the number of judgments that have been overturned in the European Court of Human Rights for human rights violations.”
“That is to say – the more judges there are, the less justice there is in this country. Thousands of people feel this, they see in concrete cases what is happening to others, and once, it will be enough,” he believes.
Although a rally of supporters of the SDS champion, who will come to protest against the trial itself, is scheduled for 2 p.m., some people were already waiting for Janša before the hearing.
T. B.
