Boris Popovič is also among the accused of the misuse of authority in the sale of municipality property on Srmin, a hill in the vicinity of Koper. While the latter trial at the District Court of Koper is in progress, the Rumena noč trial is due to fall under the statute of the 10-year limitation period next week. All of the 17 planned court proceedings had to be cancelled by the judge, since the mayor of Koper was being declared incapable of participating throughout the trial due to medical leaves of absence. The mayor has thus not been able to take part in the main hearings, but he decided to defend himself against the "attempted discretization" - as the web portal refers to the matter - by answering the charges over the public website of the municipality.

“The public is being continually misinformed about the trial connected with organizing the Rumena noč event, which is why we’ve decided to publish the truth,” says the author of the web portal, which published a number of documents as well as secret police recordings of phone conversations. Their use outside of the court room might be against the law. The publication of secret police recordings on the website of the Municipality of Koper prompted the Information Commissioner to initiate an inspection procedure on a suspected criminal offence involving a misuse of personal data. The District and the Supreme Courts are still looking into the matter.

Judgement in the name of the chosen people
“The author would like to see a ‘judgement in the name of the people’, but only the people he has decided to address, and with the proofs he has both chosen for the audience by himself as well as presented by himself only. This is of course manipulation,” argues Dragan Petrovec, a professor at the Ljubljana Law School.
Chief prosecutor at the District Court of Koper, Slavko Ožbolt, says that police recordings have become part of criminal proceedings and are therefore no longer confidential. As one of the accused, Boris Popovič could obtain full access to them. “They have not been presented in the main hearing yet, and the only person to oppose them is the person who Boris Popovič had the conversation with in the published recording and who has not been informed about the contents of the conversations yet,” points out Ožbolt.

“By publishing secret police recordings, the author may have caused some harm. The ones who have a say in estimating this matter are the law enforcement, which is to determine whether a misuse of data has occurred, and possibly the ones affected by this publication, the people in the recordings,” argues Petrovec, adding that a municipality bulletin is not a proper place for such publications.