On 7 August, after a fifteen month wait, the Calvary Chapel
Protestant church in the eastern Slovenian town of Celje became the first new
religious community to be granted registration in the country since 1999.
"We now have the rights to function as an official religious
community," the church's pastor Justin Gerry told Forum 18 News Service on
27 August. "This provides us the opportunity to represent ourselves openly
in the community as a group with official standing." The Tibetan Buddhist
Dharmaling association received registration on 22 August, while the Hindu
community is expecting registration imminently.
Natasa Sivic, a leader of the Hindu community, told Forum 18 on 27 August that
she had met the head of the government's Office for Religious Communities,
Drago Cepar, in the capital Ljubljana two days earlier. "He promised to
register us this week," she reported. The Hindu community, which has
existed for eight years, lodged its first registration application with the
Office in March 2002.
Asked whether registration would end the Hindus' problems, Sivic responded:
"We will see. It has been a big problem not having registration."
However, she said the community was already building a small temple in a
private flat in Ljubljana and would be able to follow suit in other towns,
including Maribor and Celje. She said there were more than a thousand Hindus or
people interested in Hinduism in Slovenia.
Cepar had long insisted that he was unable to register any religious
communities as the law did not spell out criteria to determine which groups
constituted religious communities (see F18News 18 June 2003). "There was
an unofficial moratorium ever since Dr Cepar took office in 2000," Pastor
Gerry told Forum 18.
Sivic said Cepar seemed more relaxed during their meeting about registering
religious communities. She believed a June letter from Mirko Bandelj, general
secretary of the government, instructing Cepar to register all waiting
communities, was crucial. "He said it is now not his problem to worry
about, so there is no longer any difficulty about registering
communities." She also believed Forum 18's articles had contributed to
breaking through the impasse.
Also pushing for an end to the registration obstruction was the ombudsman's
office, which is headed by Matjaz Hanzek. "Our office played a great role
in the registrations, first through letters to Mr Cepar and then through
constant exposition of this issue in the media," spokesperson Barbara
Samaluk told Forum 18 from Ljubljana on 27 August.
Gerry said his church, affiliated with Calvary Chapel in the United States and
the only affiliated congregation in Slovenia, has 20 regular active
participants, though more attend services. It applied for registration with the
Office for Religious Communities in person in April 2002. Cepar visited the
church on 27 July of this year, three days after it was informed its
application had been filed. On 7 August the church was officially notified of
its registration. The Office gave no explanation of why the application had
been held up for fifteen months.
"After several letters to human rights representatives and to the
government of Slovenia, and after the very useful reports from Forum 18,
Dharmaling has been finally registered as the Buddhist Religious
Community," the abbot of the Dharmaling Buddhist community, Gelong
Shenphen, told Forum 18 from Ljubljana on 27 August. The association was formed
last December and formally lodged its registration application in January. It too
received no explanation for the delay in gaining registration.
The registration of Calvary Chapel and the Dharmaling community have already
been noted on the Office for Religious Communities website
(http://www.gov.si/uvs).
Forum 18 has been unable to identify the other seven or so religious
communities believed to be waiting for registration. The ombudsman's office has
identified one of them as the Stoic Pantheists, but told Forum 18 it does not
know the identity of the others. Cepar – who was unavailable by telephone on 27
August - has declined to identify them to Forum 18. Nor have local journalists,
who have widely covered the registration obstruction.