Expert commissions of the Ministry of Culture

We submitted three concerts to the call for tenders of the Ministry of Culture JPR-GUM-2024. All three applications were evaluated too poorly to achieve co-financing. In the Sporočila I published all three decisions and my comment on them, together with some thoughts about the importance of the Seviqc programme.

Expert commissions are supposed to be consultative bodies of the minister (Article 20 of ZUJIK, look Ministry of Culture, 4. Exercising of the Public Interest in Culture Act) and Article 113 stipulates that the expert commission is the main decision-maker of co-financing. Consultative is something completely different from decision-making.

We will perform the concerts despite the negative decisions.

We will continue our efforts to have the Ministry of Culture re-introduce the right to defence, which was withdrawn in 2016 by Minister Peršak with the cynical explanation that it is better for applicants (see: at 22.2.2024, Appeal to the Prime Minister, 1.9.2016, Rulebook on the Implementation, page 3) 

According to the current practice, the applicant does not have the possibility to object, when the expert committee evaluates the application, the Ministry of Culture immediately issues a decision, which is final. The only possible appeal is a lawsuit to the Administrative Court, which is expensive, slow, and ineffective. The Administrative Court judges only the procedural side, but not the content. The right to defence related to mediation, if the applicant and the expert committee could not agree on the assessment, is the only way to preserve good programmes.

All the tragedy of the current expert commission is briefly and eloquently described by the comment of our brilliant violinist Ana Julija Mlejnik Železnik: "We are talking about the great Johann Sebastian Bach. If his works are no longer considered weighty and important, we can just throw the entire development of the music scene from his time to the present in the trash and close shop. But famous pieces of music are famous for a reason."

Ana Julija Mlejnik Železnik will perform at Seviqc 2024 with her Belgian ensemble The Legacy of Bach on Wednesday, 21.8.2024 at 19:30 in Old County in Celje.