Ljubljana related
STA, 5 September 2019 - Interior Minister Boštjan Poklukar is known for saying the Slovenian police are fully in control of migration. "If this was not the case, we would have more illegal migrants in the country, at railway stations, cities and abandoned buildings," he told the STA. He said the country was cooperating well with Croatia and Italy.
"Slovenia being a safe country is a fact confirmed by international comparisons and many countries envy us on this," Poklukar said in an interview with the STA.
He believes that the statistics on the foreigners apprehended prove that police are on top of things.
Slovenia has apprehended more than 9,600 people this year and some 460 persons have been returned to Slovenia from Austria, Italy and Hungary. Poklukar believes this shows that only few people avoid being caught.
He pointed to the beefed up security measures such as additional fences on the border and high resolution systems of video- and thermal cameras.
According to the minister, police are also successfully preventing migrant smuggling by individuals and criminal rings mostly from the Balkans and Slovenia.
Investigators have formed special task forces to deal with this and police are cooperating well with Frontex, Europol and Interpol.
Poklukar also praised cooperation with other countries. Cooperation with Croatia has improved significantly since the 2015 and 2016 mass migrations, he said.
Slovenian police officers are cooperating in mixed patrols with Croatian and Italian counterparts. The deal on the mixed patrols with Italy envisages such cooperation until the end of September.
"We are evaluating the situation on a daily basis and I have found them to be successfully preventing illegal human trafficking," Poklukar said about the patrols.
He is confident that the success of Slovenian police will be recognised by Italy. He reiterated Slovenia opposed a fence on the Slovenian-Italian border for historical reasons and because it would disturb the lives of locals.
The country is also bothered by the fact that Austria continues to conduct controls on its border with Slovenia, an issue Poklukar plans to discuss with his Austrian counterpart in Ljubljana next Monday.
According to the minister, Slovenian police are also monitoring the migration flow in Balkan countries, in particular in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and are helping protect the borders in Serbia and North Macedonia.
Four new police attaches are to be deployed to Skopje, Rome, Zagreb and Vienna shortly.
Asked whether the mass influx of migrants such as the one Europe witnessed a few years ago could happen again, Poklukar said that there was some fear that the migration flow would enhance every autumn due to upcoming winter but not in the scope as in 2015 and 2016.
He said Slovenia was ready for a potential influx and expected Croatia to protect the EU's external border as efficiently as Slovenia is protecting the Schengen border.
STA, 28 August 2019 - Police in Celje have apprehended several persons suspected of trafficking some 280 migrants across the Slovenian border in a sting that involved over 70 criminal investigators conducting house searches in and around the city.
Eight suspects face trafficking charges and two will be additionally charged with offences related to illicit drugs. Four of the suspects remain in detention and one is abroad. All of them are Slovenian citizens, the Celje police said on Wednesday.
The suspects, some of whom have previous trafficking convictions, are believed to have run a part of a larger international criminal racket specialised in trafficking migrants.
The group is believed to have trafficked migrants from Croatia through Slovenia and into Italy in collaboration with multiple other foreign gangs, charging EUR 2,000-3,000 per person, according to Damijan Turk, the head of the Celje criminal police.
The racket enlisted drug addicts and other persons from the margins of society to carry out the actual transport with vans and cars, often even in rented recreational vehicles. The drivers would get EUR 250-500 per migrant.
Uroš Lavrič, the head of the organised crime division at the General Police Directorate, said human trafficking activities of criminal rings had picked up recently as they take advantage of illegal migrations along the Balkan route.
"They use various methods to keep the trafficking covert. They are ruthless," he said about the traffickers' habit of stuffing between 30 and 50 migrants into the cargo holds of vans.
Police have arrested 273 suspected traffickers so far this year, compared to 218 in the whole of 2018.
They intercepted over 9,000 migrants who tried to cross the border illegally, up 62% over the year before, show data by the General Police Directorate.
A total of 6,223 persons were returned to Croatia and 3,255 requested asylum.
Related: Smuggling People Now More Profitable than Drugs for Organised Crime in Slovenia
Radio Slovenia has a report that looks at the economics of human smuggling in Slovenia, finding that the profits can be even greater than those of moving illegal drugs across borders.
The story – which comes after a spike in police interceptions of human traffickers, with, for example, seven people recently arrested in Celje for moving at least 270 individuals through Slovenia – interviews a former intelligence officer, Boštjan Perne , with over 15 years of intelligence experience in the Balkans. He claims that human smugglers now charge more than €5,000 for transport in trucks along a route that leads directly from Turkey to Western Europe. However, this price is too high for many would-be migrants, who thus tend to pay less, from €200 to €500, to be moved across individual borders.
Related: Foreigners Account for 1/4 of Slovenia’s Prisoners, Most Jailed for Human Smuggling
While Perne states that Slovenians are obviously involved in this aspect of organised crime, he also notes the international nature of the business: "If we look at the different nationalities currently imprisoned for trafficking in human beings, you will see that here [Slovenia] is the real mecca of different nations - Serbs, Croats, Pakistanis, Slovenians, Germans, Italians."
All our stories on human trafficking are here
STA, 27 August - The police apprehended on Monday two migrant smugglers transporting a total of 38 migrants in two vehicles in the Kočevje and Cerknica areas in south Slovenia.
Nearby the town of Kočevje the police apprehended on Monday morning a Romanian driver transporting 31 migrants in a van.
According to the Ljubljana Police Department, police officers stopped the van following a local's tip-off and apprehended the driver upon discovering his human cargo. None of the 31 migrants has requested for international protection.
Other recent cases
Meanwhile, a Lithuanian was caught in the vicinity of Cerknica on Monday evening trying to smuggle seven Afghanistan citizens who have illegally crossed the border and are still being processed.
The Novo Mesto police department meanwhile reported on Tuesday the capture of two smugglers transporting larger groups of migrants.
Nearby Črnomelj in the south, the police caught an Italian who was transporting 34 Pakistani and Afghan migrants in a single van on Monday afternoon.
Moreover, a Slovenian citizen was apprehended at Mokrice in south-eastern Slovenia on Sunday evening transporting five Kurdish illegal migrants with Turkish citizenship. He has been placed in detention.
STA, 26 August 2019 - A 25-year-old Moroccan citizen and 18-year-old from Algeria pleaded guilty in Novo Mesto on Monday to abducting a 79-year-old man near the Croatian border in May and using his car to get to Italy. They were each handed a 21-month prison sentence, which is in line with the plea bargain.
The two apologised to the abducted man and to Slovenia, expressing remorse and arguing they had suffered from mental and physical problems due to the long journey to Europe. The Algerian said he had left his home country in September 2018 and the Moroccan in December.
The pair have been in detention since 10 May together with another Algerian, whose age however remains to be determined by the authorities. He claims to be a minor even though he stated he was 18 when he initially applied for asylum.
Novo Mesto District Court judge Betka Šimc handed the pair nine months each in prison for robbery, seven for abduction and six for car theft to confirm a combined sentence of 21 months.
She assessed the plea bargain as favourable for the defendants, saying the prosecution had probably considered their young age. Still, their youth cannot serve as an excuse, she added, noting they had left their countries out of fear for their life while they ended up putting another man's life in peril.
After serving the sentence they will be deported from Slovenia and will not be allowed to ask for re-entry for five years.
They will moreover need to pay the local man EUR 213 in damages to cover the costs of a replacement car he used after the incident in which his car was damages.
The man was seeking EUR 50,000 in damages from the two for the fear and health-related consequences suffered but the court asked him to seek the damages in a civil lawsuit, arguing proving the remaining damage would protract proceedings excessively.
A group of migrants - the reports suggested four men - tied up the man in his vineyard near the south-eastern town of Črnomelj on the border with Croatia on 8 May. They put him into the boot of his car and then drove around Slovenia for several hours.
The abductors stopped the car near a village close to the town of Sežana on the south-western border with Italy, untied and released the man, and proceed on foot to Italy. They were arrested there by Italian police and handed to Slovenia.
Under Slovenia's penal code, abduction carries a prison sentence of six months to ten years, or less if the abductor releases the victim of their own accord, whereas theft carries a sentence of up to two years.
The incident, which came amid a continuing flow of migrants through Slovenia, stirred the country and also marked the campaign for the 26 May elections to the European Parliament.
Security measures on the border with Croatia have been stepped up since and mixed patrols have been introduced on the border with Italy.
Related: Abduction Suspects Detained, Analysts Fear Incident Will Spur Anti-Migrant Populism
STA, 21 August 2019 - Slovenia has started erecting another 40 kilometres of fence along the border with Croatia, commercial broadcaster POP TV reported on Wednesday. Works are currently underway on a 4-kilometre segment between the villages of Zilje and Žuniči, southeast of Črnomelj.
In July, the contractor, Serbia-based Legi-SGS, was chosen for the job by the Public Administration Ministry, but it the department would not reveal where the additional 40 kilometres of fencing would be erected, saying the locations had been specified in a confidential document.
It did say, however, that additional fence would be erected in places where this is required to prevent illegal migration and protect locals and their assets. In some places, the new fence is needed because the old one is damaged.
Once the EUR 4.8 million project is complete, expected in a few weeks' time, more than 200 kilometres of Slovenia's 670-kilometre border with Croatia will be fenced in.
STA, 16 August 2019 - July saw the highest number of illegal crossings of the state border in a month since the 2016 migration wave - more than 1,700. During the first seven months of this year the upward trend in such crossings was steeper than last year, according to police.
In July a total of 1,740 illegal crossings were detected, while the police recorded 7,415 in the first seven months, mostly apprehending illegal migrants from Pakistan, Algeria and Afghanistan.
Related: Foreign Nationals in Slovenia, by Country, Region & Continent
Below you will find the charts with the numbers of illegal border crossings, including the year, citizenship, period, police department and the number of persons handed over to Slovenia from foreign authorities or vice versa.
The charts also feature the number of international protection requests as well as the number of approved requests and the number of asylum seekers by their accommodation so far.
Number of illegal border crossings in the first half of the year by year
year number of crossings ------------------ 2010 339 2011 419 2012 399 2013 660 2014 384 2015 181 2016 273 2017 754 2018 3635 2019* 5568 *up to 31 July Source: Police
Number of illegal border crossings in the first seven months of 2018 and 2019 by citizenship
citizenship number of crossings
2018 2019
------------------------------------
Pakistan 1446 1705
Algeria 643 1153
Afghanistan 482 811
Morocco 250 592
Turkey 106 371
Bangladesh 22 521
Iraq 228 364
Iran 271 368
Syria 432 318
Tunisia 60 141
other 819 1071
-----------------------------------
total 4759 7415
Source: Police
Number of processed illegal border crossings in the first seven months of 2018 and 2019 by police department
department number of crossings
2018 2019
----------------------------------------
Koper 2032 2807
Novo Mesto 1978 1918
Ljubljana 225 1556
Maribor 355 676
Celje 52 134
Murska Sobota 98 176
other 18 148
Source: Police
Number of illegal border crossings and international protection requests in 2018 and in the first seven months of 2019 by month
number of crossings number of requests month 2018 2019 2018 2019 --------------------------------------------------- January 246 319 172 205 February 210 328 223 216 March 207 1079 129 356 April 644 1381 274 334 May 1286 1298 365 404 June 1040 1270 267 287 July 1114 1740 287 387 August 1152 381 September 999 256 October 1270 201 November 717 170 December 357 150 -------------------------------------------------- total 1-6 3633 7415 1430 2189 Source: Interior Ministry, Police
Number of persons returned to the Slovenian authorities and to foreign authorities in the first seven months of 2018 and 2019
returned to Slovenian returned to foreign authorities authorities country 2018 2019 2018 2019 --------------------------------------------------------------- Italy 193 184 39 55 Austria 15 53 8 8 Croatia 6 15 1715 4827 Hungary 12 1 2 0 airports 94 163 20 18 --------------------------------------------------------------- total 320 416 1784 4908 Source: Police
Number of international protection requests in 2018 and in the first half of 2019 as well as their status
status number
2018 2019
---------------------------------------------------
total number of requests 2875 1802
requests to repeat the procedure 40 13
repeated procedures 27 30
closed cases 2886 1762
approved status 102 40
rejected applications 135 54
halting of procedure 2372 1535
discarded applications 277 133
resettlement 40 0
relocation 21 0
Source: Interior Ministry
Number of asylum seekers and persons with international protection and their accommodation up to today
Asylum seekers
accommodation number ----------------------------------------------- Asylum Centre 182 Kotnikova Street, Ljubljana 79 Logatec 23 dispersed 33 other 29 ------------------------------------------------ total 346
Persons with international protection
accommodation number ----------------------------------------------- Ljubljana Integration House 0 Maribor Integration House 25 Government-approved flats 18 Asylum Centre 1 Kotnikova Street, Ljubljana 1 Logatec 0 Student homes 14 Private accommodation 506 abroad 115 ----------------------------------------------- total 680 Source: The Government Office for the Support and Integration of Migrants
STA, 7 August 2019 - The government decided on Wednesday to extend the deployment of auxiliary police to help the regular force cope with a spike in illegal migration on the Schengen border with Croatia and with other duties.
In line with today's decision, auxiliary police will be deployed until the end of the year to help patrol the border and stand in for absent regular police officers.
Under the valid legislation, auxiliary police may be called in for up to 30 days in a calendar year.
Only about 70% of police force jobs are filled on average, while illegal migration is on the rise, the government said.
It also noted a deterioration in road safety and the engagement of larger numbers of police officers in providing the security at a number of upcoming high-risk events such as a meeting of the NATO Military Committee, and the VIP Forum 2019 to be held in Ljubljana in September.
Security challenges will be stepped up later on in the year, so there is reason to expect an increased scope of duties in various areas of police work.
This is why most of the auxiliary police have already been engaged to help secure the border or stand in for regular police officers providing the security at high-risk events.
Some 460 auxiliary police have already been called in this year and they have already completed about a third of the 30 day-quota on average.
All our stories on the borders are here
STA, 6 August 2019 - A civil initiative providing advocacy for asylum seekers has warned about allegedly unbearable conditions at Ljubljana's Vič Asylum Centre, accusing some security guards of intimidation and even involvement in organised smuggling of asylum seekers. Security firm Varovanje Galekom denies all the accusations.
The Fight for Freedom/La Lutte de la Liberte group gave a news conference on Tuesday in front of the asylum centre, located in the south-west in Cesta v Gorice Street, after a recent fight between asylum seekers and security guards which involved a knife.
The initiative suspects some of the Galekom security guards are involved in organised smuggling of asylum seekers.
The Government Office for the Support and Integration of Migrants, responding to the news conference, said an asylum seeker had notified it of the alleged smuggling last month, which was then reported to the police.
The Ljubljana Police Department confirmed for the STA several persons were being investigated, but provided no details as the investigation is in the preliminary stage.
According to the civil initiative, the asylum seeker who had reported the suspicion of human smuggling was intimidated by some other security guards, who also denied him medication.
The foreigner's medical conditions eventually worsened, as a result of which he was involved in three fights, including the most massive one on 25 July, which also involved the police, the initiative said.
The police detained two foreigners involved in the incident. One of them was sent to the Centre for Foreigners in Postojna, south-west, which he cannot leave, so he started a hunger strike.
The initiative believes the asylum seeker was moved to Postojna because he had complained about the smuggling of people, and was deprived of freedom for what he had seen.
This was denied by Katarina Štrukelj, the acting head of the government office. She said the two things were not related, explaining the asylum seeker was moved to Postojna because of inappropriate conduct and violent behaviour.
She said the 25 July incident took place after the foreigner came to the reception desk complaining he could not sleep, and lied on the floor with a knife wrapped in a towel.
When the security guards tried to take his knife, he got violent, so the police were called in, and did its job, Štrukelj said in a press release.
She said the cooperation between the asylum centre and the security firm was good, adding three security guards deemed unfit for the job had been replaced.
Galekom confirmed this, saying some security guards were evaluated as acting outside the set rules already in June, so the security firm took action against them.
It strongly rejected the allegation its staff acted brutally, explaining they had certain measures at disposal but resorted to them only when really necessary.
This was also the case with pepper spray in the 25 July incident, Galekom said, adding its staff "acted professionally with a focus on understanding and humanity".
It said the firm and security guard heads at the asylum centre's facilities took great care in carrying out their duties to avoid any abuse of security measures.
"No security guard yells at people at the asylum centre, abuses them or treats them inappropriately."
Galekom added asylum seekers were aware no sharp objects were allowed on the premises, so it intends to file a criminal report against the asylum seeker.
Štrukelj also said some asylum seekers suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, so events such as these did happen, "but not very often at the annual level".
Meanwhile, Jošt Žagar of the civil initiative said the asylum seekers with whom they were in touch could not appear at today's press conference.
"The boys ... are not allowed to leave the asylum centre today. Something is apparently being covered up."
Reading their statement in Arabic, English and Slovenian, members of the initiative also said asylum seekers were accommodated in small, cramped rooms, get only the most basic medical services and have practically no access to public transportation. They also criticised lengthy procedures to get asylum or a work permit granted.
But apart from the criticism, the initiative also stressed not all security guards were violent.
It praised some for "doing their job in a very humane manner", and lauded the situation at the asylum centre's department for families.
The latest data from the office for migrants shows there were 313 asylum seekers in Slovenia yesterday, of whom the most at the asylum centre in Cesta v Gorice Street.
While this facility can accommodate 203 persons, there were 167 there on 5 August.
STA, 5 August 2019 - Four men from Koper have been sentenced to a total of more than 11 years in jail for transporting illegal migrants who crossed into Slovenia from Croatia in the south, a regional newspaper reports.
According to Primorske Novice, the group went into the business of smuggling migrants early in 2018, after a Croat crashed a vehicle full of migrants into a Slovenian police patrol car before fleeing home.
The Croat allegedly got in touch with a Koper man, now aged 29, who recruited three more men from Koper and its vicinity. They are now aged 30, 35 and 28.
The group did their business as part of a criminal ring, other members of which gathered illegal migrants in the Zagreb area and organised their transport to the border with Slovenia.
The migrants crossed the border on foot with the help of guides, and two of the four Koper men then organised their transport ahead, performed by the other two defendants.
Facing the charges at the Koper District Court in the spring this year, two of the four pleaded guilty, the 29-year-old and the 28-year-old.
The latter was given a year and 8 months for transporting migrants twice. He will serve the sentence by performing 1,200 hours of community work. He was also slapped with a EUR 2,000 fine.
The 29-year-old was sentenced to eight and a half years for smuggling of migrants, reckless driving and abandoning an injured person in an accident, all of which happened during his arrest.
The other two pleaded not guilty. They were sentenced to three and a half and three years in prison and fines of EUR 1,000 and 2,000. The sentences are not yet final, Primorske Novice writes.
The four were involved in the illegal business between February and May 2018 in the areas of Ilirska Bistrica and Mlini in Istria.
