"The EU cannot continue to ignore the plight of thousands of citizens who are still living in legal limbo or awaiting compensation from the Slovenian authorities for being denied their most basic rights," Amnesty International said in a statement on Monday.
"Exactly fifteen years ago today, a few months after Slovenia declared its independence, the authorities took an extraordinary decision that has since been condemned by the country"s highest courts, the UN and the Council of Europe: the removal of over 18, 000 persons, mostly of Roma origin, from the Slovenian registry of permanent residents," the organisation said in the statement.
"The 'erased', so called because they were effectively erased from the registry, lost a series of basic rights overnight. Amnesty International has consistently documented cases of people denied access to health care and education and who very often lost their homes, jobs and pensions as a direct result of this measure,"
In the letter to the Commission and the European Parliament, Amnesty International asks "that the EU should obtain clearly benchmarked commitments from Slovenia to remedy this continuing injustice in the course of 2007 and certainly before Slovenia assumes the EU Presidency in January 2008," the statement said, among other things.
The Slovene press agency STA reported today that a few months before the European Commissioner for Freedom, Justice and Security, Franco Frattini, had received a delegation representing 'the erased', and that he had recently stated that the issue of granting citizenship was not within the EU acquis communautaire but something EU member-states should tackle within their national legislation.
In response to Frattini's statement, the legal representative and former judge of the Slovene Constitutional Court, Matevz Krivic, then described the Commissioner's position as hypocritical, and added that it would be naive to expect anything more from Eurocrats.
Krivic made a blueprint petition on the erased which the European parliament in charge of petition is expected to discuss.