He rose to prominence during the Slovenian spring, when he served as chairman of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, the largest independent civil society movement in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia.

Igor Bavčar was born in the town of Postojna in western Slovenia, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to a family originating from the Vipava Valley.

At the same time, he remained active in public life in the Socialist Alliance of the Working People, an auxiliary organization of the Communist party, founded to cover the civil society sphere.

Together with Janez Janša, he established contacts with Stane Kavčič, a former reformist Slovenian Communist politician who had been deposed during the authoritative turn in Yugoslav internal policy in 1972, and published his memoirs.

In May 1988, when the Yugoslav People's Army arrested four journalists of the alternative magazine Mladina, including his friend Janez Janša, Bavčar became one of the founding members of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights.

When the DEMOS coalition won the first free elections in Slovenia in April 1990, Bavčar became Minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Lojze Peterle.

After the crisis in the DEMOS coalition in early 1992, after the fall of Lojze Peterle's government, Bavčar unsuccessfully tried to get elected as Prime Minister.