Biography
Miha Brejc was born to a Slovene family in Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia. His father was Tomo Brejc, an influential antifascist left-wing trade unionist who had emigrated from the Julian March to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the 1920s and fought as a partisan in the Yugoslav People's Liberation War. The family moved back to Slovenia when Miha Brejc was still a child. He studied at the University of Ljubljana, where he graduated in sociology in 1975. He continued his studies at the same university, obtaining a master's degree in 1983 and a PhD in organisational sciences in 1985. He worked at the University of Ljubljana since 1988, first as a senior lecturer and later as a professor.
After the victory of the DEMOS coalition at the first democratic elections in 1990, Brejc was appointed Director of the Slovenian Security and Intelligence Service. He carried out the difficult task of democratization and pluralization of an institution that had served as one of the columns of political oppression during Communist times. In 1992, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Slovenia. In 1993, he was dismissed as director of the Security Agency by the then Prime Minister Janez Drnovšek, and returned to the academia.
From 1994 to 1998 he was actively involved in local politics as the chairman of the Municipal Council of Domžale. During the same period, he also served as the dean of the High School for Public Administration of the University of Ljubljana. During this time, he advanced several proposals for the reform and modernization of the public administration system in Slovenia.
In 1995 he was elected vice-president of Social Democratic Party of Slovenia. In 2000, he became the minister of labour, family and social affairs in the short-lived centre-right government led by Andrej Bajuk. In 2000, he was elected to the Slovenian Parliament and from 2000 to 2004 he served as vice-president of the National Assembly of Slovenia.
He is also the chairman of the Slovenia-Taiwan Friendship Association.
His older brother, Tomaž Brejc, is an art critic. His son, Tomo Brejc is a photographer. His son-in-law, Gregor Virant, was the Minister for Public Administration in Janez Janša's government and was the leader of a liberal political party (the Civic List).
The history of Slovenia chronicles the period of the Slovenian territory from the 5th century BC to the present. In the Early Bronze Age, Proto-Illyrian tribes settled an area stretching from present-day Albania to the city of Trieste. The Slovenian territory was part of the Roman Empire, and it was devastated by the Migration Period's incursions during late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The main route from the Pannonian plain to Italy ran through present-day Slovenia. Alpine Slavs, ancestors of modern-day Slovenians, settled the area in the late 6th Century AD. The Holy Roman Empire controlled the land for nearly 1,000 years. Between the mid-14th century through 1918 most of Slovenia was under Habsburg rule. In 1918, most Slovene territory became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and in 1929 the Drava Banovina was created within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia with its capital in Ljubljana, corresponding to Slovenian-majority territories within the state. The Socialist Republic of Slovenia was created in 1945 as part of federal Yugoslavia. Slovenia gained its independence from Yugoslavia in June 1991, and today it is a member of the European Union and NATO.
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Demetrio Volcic, also known in Slovene as Dimitrij Volčič, was an Italian journalist, author, and politician of Slovenian descent. He rose to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s as foreign correspondent for the Italian television RAI. In the late 1990s, he served as member of the Italian Senate, and later as Member of European Parliament for the European Socialist Party.
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