STA, 29 November 2018 - A former Ljubljana primary school headteacher has been put on trial for banning two male final year students from school grounds after they sexually harassed a pair of their female classmates.
According to a report in the newspaper Dnevnik, Dušan Merc, the former headteacher of the Prule primary school, is facing charges of negligence at work for violating the two boys' right to education.
The case goes back five and a half years when two year 9 Prule students harassed their classmates in a swimming pool during a sports day.
After pushing them under water several times to the point of exhaustion, they sexually attacked the girls and later even made fun of them on school premises.
Five days later, after the marking period was over, Merc banned the boys from school grounds in order to protect the victims.
Merc has support from the public and school board
The public sided with the headteacher, but a schools inspector found he acted against the rules and he demanded the school board to dismiss him, which the board refused to do.
However, the inspector's findings were taken up by the state prosecution, which filed charges against Merc. The trial started at the Ljubljana Court on Wednesday, but the judge closed it to the public due to the involvement of underage witnesses.
While the prosecutor would not comment on the case, Merc's defence counsel Andrej Razdrih told Dnevnik that this was the first time in his career that he had come across such a case.
"My client acted correctly, professionally and in a highly ethical manner," he said, blaming the trial on the personal grudge and frustration of the schools inspector.
In his plea address, Merc said that the inspection oversight in the case went on for eight months, from August 2013 to April 2014, but that the inspector never told him what he was investigating so he was unable to respond to the charges.
He said that by "suspending" the two students for three days just before the end of the school year he did not violate their constitutional right to education, but only banned them from school premises and from attending the final outing and the annual awards ceremony on the final day of school.
"My reasoning was that the victims should not meet the perpetrators again and that the school would not put up with such conduct and violence," Merc said, adding that he protected the victims from potential further sexual harassment and ridicule.
