The JBTZ trial or the JBTZ affair (), also known as the Ljubljana trial () or the Trial against the Four () was a political trial held in a military court in Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia in 1988. The defendants, Janez Janša, Ivan Borštner, David Tasić and Franci Zavrl, were sentenced to between six months' and four years' imprisonment for "betraying military secrets", after being involved in writing and publishing articles critical of the Yugoslav People's Army. The trial sparked great uproar in Slovenia, and was an important event for the organization and development of the liberal democratic opposition in the republic. The Committee for the Defence of Human Rights was founded on the same day of the arrest, which is generally considered as the beginning of the so-called Slovenian Spring. Background In the late 1980s, Slovenia embarked on a process of liberal democratic reform, which went unparalleled in the other five Yugoslav republics. The Slovenian communist leadership, under Milan Kučan, was allowing an ever-greater degree of freedom of the press. The magazine Mladina was taking advantage of this and became extremely popular in Slovenia, deliberately testing the borders of press freedom with news and satire breaking old taboos. In 1987 it started more and more frequently attacking the Yugoslav People's Army (YPA) and its leadership, for instance labeling the defense minister, Branko Mamula, a "merchant of death" for selling arms to famine-stricken Ethiopia. Many of the articles were written by the young defense expert Janez Janša, who soon became a particular irritant for the YPA leadership. As far as the YPA were concerned, Mladina was attacking the army, the main protector of Yugoslav unity, and hence attacking Yugoslavia itself. When they realized that the Slovene government were not going to crack down on Mladina, they decided to do so themselves. In 1988, Mladina got its hands on notes from a secret meeting of the central committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, detailing plans for arrest of journalists and dissidents in Slovenia. Their possession of these documents gave the YPA the pretext it needed. Shortly after, on 31 May, Janša, another Mladina journalist, David Tasić, and a Slovene sergeant in the YPA, Ivan Borštner, were arrested. Later the editor of Mladina, Franci Zavrl, was also arrested. They were charged with betraying military secrets, a charge that would have to be tried in a military court. Thus the