The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 138138 THE SCARS OF THE ERASURE7. ConclusionThe violation of the erased people’s rights was twofold: their rights werefirst violated when they were deprived of legal status and then again when theyendured numerous resulting measures following the erasure. A look at today’spattern of human rights violations suggests that state authorities are only tooaware that they can prevent people from accessing specific rights by deprivingthem of a particular status, since the scope of rights differs from one country toanother depending on the legal status of a person claiming the rights. Using themethod of chain reasoning, state authorities justify presumably lawful exclusionon the grounds that a person does not have a residence permit in a country orthat he/she did not have permission to enter the country. The Slovenian authoritiesalso resorted to this method to be able to justify the violation of the erasedpersons’ rights.By analyzing the erased people’s stories in terms of protected humanrights, it is possible to establish many violations of civil and political rights.Among these, particularly significant is the violation of the prohibition of expulsion;moreover, expulsions were carried out without court ruling. There were vio -lations of the prohibition on torture, inhuman or degrading treatment: forexample, in the cases of police violence endured by erased persons during theperiod when they lived in Slovenia without documents or legal status. Erasedpeople had the right to leave the country, but it was difficult to realize it in practicebecause of circumstances at the time or because departure entailed graveconsequences, so that anyone wanting to avoid them refrained from exercisingthis right. Their right to freedom of movement was also violated, as the erasedpeople were, and some still are, detained in the Center for Aliens. In some casesthe detention was not effected with a view to expulsion from the country, giventhat the Center staff had instructions to release those who applied for permanentresidence, i.e. to release them immediately after they submitted such an application.Given frequent police harassment and resulting fear and uncertainty, itis possible to establish that the right to personal security was also violated. Theerased people were, and still are, frequently the victims of hate-speech thatclearly meets all the criteria to qualify as the criminal offense of inciting hate orintolerance, but so far not one perpetrator of hate speech has been sentenced.The erasure led to the violation of the right to private and family life. Insome cases it caused the deterioration of family relations, in others it led to thebreak-up of a family or prevented, actually and legally, family members fromliving together. The right to effective remedy was violated, since despite the ConstitutionalCourt ruling in favor of erased people, their rights were not remediedbecause the ruling was not implemented in practice. In other words, the initiativeto assess constitutionality was an ineffective remedy, at least until 2009. Therewere also instances of the violation of the right to found a family, or more concretely,the right of an unmarried father to be named as the father on the child’s