New law on asylum in Slovenia

Controversial and untenable are the provisons of the new law that:

1. put the discretion right to decide either someone is entitled to become asylum seeker or not in the hands of the police. According to this provision Slovene police would make first selection among potential asylum seekers already on the border. In this procedure no legal assistance to asylum seeker is foreseen. By this asylum seekers are stripped of basic human right for legal protection. Minister of internal affairs, Dragutin Mate, justifies this provision by security reasons (terrorism and crime). By this migration is for slovenian government officialy security problem and not economic and social.

2. abolishes legal assistance free of charge during the first step of asylum procedure (from the point when someone makes application to the first audience in front of the person in charge of granting or not the application for asylum). Asylum seekers are hardly able to pay legal assistance by themselves, furthermore, they have no knowledge of the law on asylum and their rights.

3. abolishes already miserable money substitute (7 Euros per month) and at the same time takes away the right to work for asylum seekers. According to existing law, asylum seekers are allowed to work 8 hours per week. New law states that in the first year they have no right to work.

4. aggravates possibilities for uninstitutionalised residence of asylum seekers (outside the s.c. Home for asylum seekers, which is under the state controle and which is resemblant to a prison, with closed division and strict order concerning coming and leaving the institution) through the abolition of money assistance for those that decide to live outside the mentioned institution. Of course already mentioned abolishion of the right to work also makes imposible more autonomous life for asyum seekers.

Despite many protests from movements for migrant's rights, NGOs and even UNHCR (which stated that existing law is good and that there are no reasons to adopt new law that is going to make such considerable cuts into rights of asylum seekers) government pushed a proposal of the law into the Parliament in which ruling right wing parties are thinking to adopt the law in exceptional (fast) pocedure, without any public and parlamentary debates. It seems that the law is going to be adopted in middle of Dezember 2005.