government of Slovenia had no involvement in the proceedings. The trial The YPA was hoping to impose a level of control on Slovenia, and assert its authority in the republic. In the event however, the JBTZ trial, as it became known from the initials of the accused (Janša, Borštner, Tasić, Zavrl), was a complete failure for the YPA, and only served to alienate the Slovenes from Yugoslavia. Slovene public opinion rallied massively behind the four accused. A Committee for the defense of Human Rights was formed, and a petition drawn up in support of the four accused gathered 100,000 signatures. A demonstration on the central Congress Square of the Slovenian capital Ljubljana on 22 June was attended by at least 40,000 people. All protests passed off peacefully, giving the army no excuse to intervene. The trial was held in camera, and the nature of the documents the accused were supposed to have revealed was never officially made public, giving rise to a plethora of rumors, and to the widespread assumption that the whole trial was a frame-up to get even with Janša and Mladina. In addition, the Army made the decision to hold the trial in the Serbo-Croatian language rather than Slovenian, in spite of provisions in the Slovene republican constitution that all official business in Slovenia should be conducted in Slovenian . This further outraged Slovenian public opinion, to which the use of the Slovenian language was of great symbolic significance. The four accused were sentenced to between six months' and four years' imprisonment, and handed back to the Slovene authorities, which carried out the sentences in the mildest way possible. Zavrl later related: "I spent my days editing the magazine in my office and my nights in prison. On one occasion, when I was late getting back, I had to break into the prison over the wire!" Aftermath The effect of the JBTZ trial was what James Gow and Cathie Carmichael calls the "homogenization" of Slovene politics: it gave all Slovenes, irrespective of political stance, something to agree on. The opposition, organized in the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, was received by Janez Stanovnik, the communist president of Slovenia, who publicly expressed sympathy for their cause. The trial became an important catalyst for the organisation of political movements in Slovenia. It also gave added strength to the idea that Slovenia should seek a greater degree of