On Sunday, the 7th of November 2021, Peter Jančič, editor-in-chief of the Siol web portal, published a column entitled “Kučan’s Long March” (“Kučanov dolgi pohod” in Slovenian), in which he discussed, among other things, the way the Constitutional Court rules on different matters. According to Jančič, their way of operating is how it is due to the fact that the Constitutional Court judges are appointed through the communist party line, so to speak. The current power ratio at the highest judicial institution in Slovenia is allegedly 7:2 for the leftists.
“Milan Kučan, his Constitutional Arch Coalition parties, and the protesters have failed to achieve what they wanted – they wanted to ensure that we would have already been without a government at this point, and approaching the early elections. However, with the help of “their” Constitutional Court judges and political activists, they also helped make sure that the epidemic caught us less prepared than we could have been,” wrote the editor-in-chief of the web portal Siol, Peter Jančič, in his latest column.
“With the help of Nataša Pirc Musar, the Police Union managed to temporarily suspend the measure which encouraged vaccination, at the Constitutional Court – in just a week’s time,” Jančič wrote. The majority of the Constitutional Court judges assessed that making vaccination a condition for regular work of the police officers and civil servants had more serious consequences on our society than the potential spread of the epidemic. Jančič sees this as a message from the Constitutional Court to the public that vaccination is not important and that testing is sufficient. This was decided by the majority, left-wing part of the Constitutional Court judges, who currently occupy seven seats in the current, nine-seat composition.
Protesters are insignificant performers and puppets
Jančič believes that various protesters and people who gather at rallies are insignificant performers and puppets who are only spreading the virus with their actions. They are cheap labour in the hands of politicians and state officials. According to Jančič, the leader of the Resni.ca party (the Truth), Zoran Stevanović, was a rather significant figure in all of this, and neither rapper Zlatan Čordić, nor Anis Ličina were as important. “The real forces in the background were the leaders of left-wing political parties, who only appeared on the streets a few times: Tanja Fajon, Marjan Šarec, Luka Mesec, and – of course – Milan Kučan, too.”
Jančič believes that the left-wing majority at the Constitutional Court is also at least partially responsible for the current state of affairs, as it adopted the decision before the summer that the government had no legal basis for restricting unreported rallies during the COVID-19 epidemic due to poor legislation from the past. In this case, the Constitutional Court remained faithful to the letter of the law and all the legal formalisms that go along with it. However, as Jančič pointed out, things used to be different.
In the past, despite the great ideological diversity in the benches of the Constitutional Court, judges were able to make a unanimous decision, an example of this being the annulment of all judgments in the Patria case. “Today, however, we are witnessing outvoting. During the epidemic. We saw another such verdict this week as well, with an even tighter majority than the usual 7:2. Five judges voted in favour, three voted against. Among those who were against was also the president of the Constitutional Court, Rajko Knez. He very convincingly pointed out that the majority is acting legally illogically.” According to Jančič, these judgments that we have been witnessing during the epidemic are no longer about law or justice at all but about preparations for the elections that will take place on the 24th of April 2021.
The politicians are to blame
“However, the responsibility for this is unfairly being attributed only to the seven left-wing judges at the Constitutional Court. They did not elect themselves to their positions. The real problem is the politicians who do not see that excessive political subordination of the judiciary is not good for the state nor the people. They are used to the judiciary being theirs entirely – from the previous system. And they are also used to the state of the media being what it currently is,” Jančič wrote in the conclusion of his column.
You can read Jančič’s column in its entirety (in Slovenian) HERE.
Ivan Šokić
