It's almost Christmas Eve and people are feeling the Christmas spirit. Some with the aid of Hollywood movies, some in other ways.
There is no Christmas spirit in real life in Slovenia. Yesterday the President wanted to bring mobile homes for the Strojan family, so that they can spend the Christmas Eve in a temporary home. But the local villagers prevented him.
What kind of Christmas spirit is that? Do Christmas miracles happen only in movies? Is real life really so cruel?
Local people argue that they have some local law forbidding people to camp in their community. I wonder if they would follow the law if anyone else decided to camp there beside the Strojan family?
The state was quick to buldozz the homes of the Strojan family. However, it took the same state a couple of years to stop a family in Ljubljana from illegally changing the inclination of their roof, and there are people in Ljubljana who decided to illegally add another floor to their homes, and they even used their neighbor's land for the workers to walk on while doing it. The neigbors complained, in vain. There was no state inspector preventing the illegal building in that case. The neigbors were told that nothing can be done. Is that hypocrisy or what?
Good Bye, Christmas Spirit in Slovenia.
Showing posts with label Discrimination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Discrimination. Show all posts
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Friday, November 17, 2006
Tonight I Can Write
The poem Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines by Pablo Neruda is resonating in my head when I think of an email that I received last night. Just yesterday I was thinking about five brave women who dared to stand up against their boss who was sexually harassing them and eventually decided to take their case to the court. And then I found an email by them in my mailbox.
I was the first and later one of the very few journalists to cover their plight. (One of the articles is found here, and here is the correction to the article because during the editiorial process somebody made a crucial mistake by accident and changed a yes to a no. My last article on the subject can be found here; later I stopped covering the story as I went on maternity leave.)
Before I could start to write the story in our paper, I first needed to explain to the editors why the story is important, and persuade them to run it. Sexual harassment in still not take seriously in this country. After the details of the harassment were revealed in a magazine (in much more graphic way that I had done on purpose, knowing that the women wouldn't want the public to read about all the details; the graphic description were revealed by their attorney), people at the paper started to say that the what had happened was horrible and that we should write about it. Since then I had free hands and I could write about it as much as I wanted.
The story which started in December 2003 ended with the verdict (on February 24 2005; my article about it can be found here) which found the boss guily; the verdict was later confirmed in the court of appeals (on March 7 2006). Thus the boss was officially and publicly found guilty and had to leave his position. (As the story ended when I was already on maternity leave, I am providing this link to the story.)
I thought that this was it and that the women finally proved that they were not lying or that they were not taking him to the court because of some kind of revenge; that they were not hysteric, that they did not overacted and so on. While working in this institution, they had to listen to such remarks daily.
The thing is that SLOVEnia had to change its Labor Rights Act in order to join the EU; the new article 45 was specifically created to meed the EU standards. It is supposed to protect the workers in such cases. This article says that it is the employer who has to prove that no sexual discrimination appeared in the office.
But who is the employer if we are talking about the public health institution whose boss is appointed by the government and supervised by a special board of the institution? The government? The Minister of Health? Should the boss who is accused of discrimination prove that he did not do it? Or should this be done by this board?
The now ex-boss is still employed by the institute. So are three out of five women. And they are seeking help again. While the criminal case (with the boss as the defendant) had been tryed in the criminal court, they also filed a lawsuit against the institution in the labour court because the institution did nothing to protect them. In September there was a possibility that the case will settle outside the court but the new boss then said that she will consult the board again. According to the women the composition of members of the board has hardly changed; in it there are more or less the same people who refused to help the women in the first place. They reacted only after the boss was found guilty.
So is it likely that they will help the women now? No. And they did not. They say they will wait until all of the legal opportunities that the boss decided to act on will run out.
That means that the whole point of Article 45 is in vain; that in this country it still up to the victim of the sexual harassment to prove that something happened to her.
No wonder that the only way to recognize and end discrimination in SLOVEnia is to ask for help from abroad as the Slovene Ombudsman did in the Ambrus case (and he was immediately critized for this by the prime minister). Only when it is clearly shown to us that what is going on is discrimination and that it is something we cannot tolerate, we are willing to open our eyes.
I cannot forget the words of a journalist from the Guardian (they are published on this blog) who said that he sees the Ambrus story through the perspective of what was happening in the 1960s in USA with African American community and its fight for the human rights.
I was the first and later one of the very few journalists to cover their plight. (One of the articles is found here, and here is the correction to the article because during the editiorial process somebody made a crucial mistake by accident and changed a yes to a no. My last article on the subject can be found here; later I stopped covering the story as I went on maternity leave.)
Before I could start to write the story in our paper, I first needed to explain to the editors why the story is important, and persuade them to run it. Sexual harassment in still not take seriously in this country. After the details of the harassment were revealed in a magazine (in much more graphic way that I had done on purpose, knowing that the women wouldn't want the public to read about all the details; the graphic description were revealed by their attorney), people at the paper started to say that the what had happened was horrible and that we should write about it. Since then I had free hands and I could write about it as much as I wanted.
The story which started in December 2003 ended with the verdict (on February 24 2005; my article about it can be found here) which found the boss guily; the verdict was later confirmed in the court of appeals (on March 7 2006). Thus the boss was officially and publicly found guilty and had to leave his position. (As the story ended when I was already on maternity leave, I am providing this link to the story.)
I thought that this was it and that the women finally proved that they were not lying or that they were not taking him to the court because of some kind of revenge; that they were not hysteric, that they did not overacted and so on. While working in this institution, they had to listen to such remarks daily.
The thing is that SLOVEnia had to change its Labor Rights Act in order to join the EU; the new article 45 was specifically created to meed the EU standards. It is supposed to protect the workers in such cases. This article says that it is the employer who has to prove that no sexual discrimination appeared in the office.
But who is the employer if we are talking about the public health institution whose boss is appointed by the government and supervised by a special board of the institution? The government? The Minister of Health? Should the boss who is accused of discrimination prove that he did not do it? Or should this be done by this board?
The now ex-boss is still employed by the institute. So are three out of five women. And they are seeking help again. While the criminal case (with the boss as the defendant) had been tryed in the criminal court, they also filed a lawsuit against the institution in the labour court because the institution did nothing to protect them. In September there was a possibility that the case will settle outside the court but the new boss then said that she will consult the board again. According to the women the composition of members of the board has hardly changed; in it there are more or less the same people who refused to help the women in the first place. They reacted only after the boss was found guilty.
So is it likely that they will help the women now? No. And they did not. They say they will wait until all of the legal opportunities that the boss decided to act on will run out.
That means that the whole point of Article 45 is in vain; that in this country it still up to the victim of the sexual harassment to prove that something happened to her.
No wonder that the only way to recognize and end discrimination in SLOVEnia is to ask for help from abroad as the Slovene Ombudsman did in the Ambrus case (and he was immediately critized for this by the prime minister). Only when it is clearly shown to us that what is going on is discrimination and that it is something we cannot tolerate, we are willing to open our eyes.
I cannot forget the words of a journalist from the Guardian (they are published on this blog) who said that he sees the Ambrus story through the perspective of what was happening in the 1960s in USA with African American community and its fight for the human rights.
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