March 8, 2018
In a solemn ceremony held at Klub Gromka in Metelkova, Ljubljana, last night, the Red Dawns collective in cooperation with the web portal spol.si editorial board announced the winner of the most sexist statement of the previous year. The Silver Thistle Award went to the former constitutional and European Court of Human Rights judge Boštjan M. Zupančič.
The human rights expert received this dishonour for the following statement, published on his Facebook page:
“Simone Veil was a traumatized woman, survivor of concentration camps. Nobody speaks of how these traumas caused her to become the ‘mother of all abortions’. Because of her legislative initiative while she was France's minister of ‘health’ millions of unborn children have been and still are deprived of legal subjectivity. These unborn children, legal subjects as nascituri since Roman law, continue to be deprived of their right to live that should steam from Art. 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights. The media celebrate her even posthumously, while she ought to be condemned as the greatest murderer of all times.”
The statement followed Simone Veil’s death on June 30 2017, and coincided with the Zupančič’s candidacy for a seat on the UN Human Rights Committee. The Slovenian government consequently withdrew Zupančič from the candidacy, explaining that his views did not reflect the government’s position and were inconsistent with Slovenia’s commitment to the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
The Jewish Cultural Centre in Ljubljana responded with a public statement at the time: “Boštjan M. Zupančič extremist views on women’s rights to decide on their own body show devastating misogyny and disrespect of the fact that women’s rights are human rights, which he pervertedly linked with distorting the experience of Nazi and Holocaust survivors.”
Meanwhile, Boštjan M. Zupančič already posted the STA report on his Silver Thistle award on his Facebook page, in an apparent expression of pride, enhanced by statements of admiration in the comments by his supporters.
This is not the first time the winner of the Silver Thistle has expressed pride in their sexism. Just last year, Angelca Likovič, who received the award for emphasizing the female duty of giving birth over the right to not be raped, expressed her content on receiving the dishonourable award and “being placed next to the journalist Rosvita Pesek”, who she “respects a lot”, with Ms Pesek being a host and journalist working for the national broadcaster, who won the award in the previous year for asking a guest in the studio to simplify what he had said, so that women could understand him as well.
In fact, only the first two Silver Thistle award winners, Milan Kučan and Borut Pahor, have apologized for their sexist statements so far. It appears that those times have ended and that open attacks on women and their rights are becoming a viable political program in the ideologically impoverished times of the Fukuyama’s End of History, in which self-proclaimed leftists such as Vesna Vuk Godina and Luj Šprohar (both nominees, both expected to defend their statements) share views on women that are more usually associated with religious extremists.
