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Countries around the world used Covid-19 as an excuse to deny residents their rights and to use the state’s monopoly on violence to intimidate people into compliance with unjust rules unsupported by science. Oftentimes, people were violently arrested for offenses as small as not wearing a mask. Now, Slovenia’s government is attempting to make up for its past wrongs by refunding residents for fines they were given for Covid violations, and by expunging their records. Michael Tennant writes in The New American:
The central-European country of Slovenia is refunding all fines issued under its former Covid-19 “mitigation” policies and expunging the records of offenders.
According to the Slovenia Times:
Between March 2020 and the end of May 2022 more than 62,000 infraction proceedings were launched under legislation that was subsequently ruled unconstitutional and the fines issued totaled €5.7 million, Justice Minister Dominika Švarc Pipan said….
About 30% or just over €1.7 million in fines had been paid before enforcement was paused soon after the new government took office in June 2022.
Now, under legislation passed by the National Assembly in September, all those fines will be dropped, and any that have been paid will be refunded. In addition, any existing proceedings against Covid offenders will be dropped, and all police records of Covid infractions will be deleted.
The previous government, led by former Prime Minister Janez Janša of the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), “had imposed tight restrictions on freedom of movement and assembly,” reported the BBC. “At various points, Slovenians were not allowed to travel beyond their local areas — and a night-time curfew was in place.” Masks were required both indoors and outdoors, “and doing anything without a Covid certificate became nigh-on impossible.”
In a famous incident, a food-delivery driver was fined 400 euros (about $439 at the current exchange rate) after cops spotted him removing his mask to have a snack outside a church. “The scene was caught on camera,” wrote the BBC. “And the photo of police surrounding a worker who was taking food to others — for the crime of slipping of [sic] his mask and having a quick bite of his own — quickly became a cause célèbre.”
Slovenia’s Constitutional Court later declared most of the Covid measures unconstitutional; but the Janša government, which was considered right-wing and friendly to then-U.S. President Donald Trump, wasn’t about to admit the error of its ways. Even as its successor, the center-left government of Prime Minister Robert Golob’s Freedom Movement party, fulfilled one of Golob’s prime campaign promises by passing the refund bill, “the SDS proposed scratching out the provision to stop enforcement of fines, arguing that if anything was indeed wrong, it should be remedied within the framework of the existing legislation,” noted the Times.
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